Hindi

Geography

Together with English, Hindi is the official language of Indian. It is also the state language of Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. Hindi is also spoken in Surinam, Mauritius, and Fiji. About 182 million people speak Hindi as their native language making Hindi the fifth largest language in the world after Mandarin, English, Spanish, and Bengali. However, many people speak Hindi as a second language -- some estimates say that around 350 million people speak Hindi.

Alphabet / Script

Hindi is written in the Devanagari script. Like other Indian languages, the letters in the Devanagari script are grouped together based on the way they are pronounced. The first 11 letters are all vowels. Then follows the velar, the palatal, the retroflex, the dental, and the labial consonants. This division indicates where in the mouth the consonants are formed.

Each consonant group contains seven to nine consonants. First comes the plosive consonants in four combinations of voiceless and voiced versions, and unaspriated and aspirated. Then follows a nasal consonant. Then the fricative consonants in voiceless and voiced versions. In the end we have the flapped, the uvular plosive, and the semi-vowels. In all: 40 consonants.

All the vowels come in two versions in the script: full vowel and vowel sign. The vowel sign is much simpler than the full vowel. It is used when a vowel follows a consonant. If a vowel follows another vowel, or if a words starts with a vowel, the full vowel is used. The is no pronunciation differences between full vowels and vowel signs.

The vowel signs are written next to the preceding consonant. Some vowel signs are written before, some after, some below, and some above the consonant. And one vowel sign is simply not written at all: the absense of a sign is the sign itself!

If two or more consonants are following each other, then the consonants are not written in full. Instead they "melt together" and form a new symbol. Some of these symbols are easy to recognize. However, some are very different from the full versions of the consonants.

Hindi uses the same punctuation marks as English, except for the full stop which is represented by a vertical line.

History

Hindi belongs to the Indo-European language group. The religious, literary, and abstract words in Hindi originate mainly Sanskrit. Hindi has also borrowed words from English and Persian.

Hindi is closely related to Urdu. The grammar of Hindi and Urdu is for the most part identical. However, Urdu draws upon Persian words for its vocabulary, and Urdu is written in Arabic-Persian script.