| Standard Hindi | ||||||
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| मानक हिन्दी Mānak Hindī | ||||||
The word "Hindi" in Devanagari script |
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| Spoken in | India Significant communities in South Africa, United States, Canada, Nepal |
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| Native speakers | 180 million[1] (1991) (see also Hindi-Urdu) |
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| Language family |
Indo-European
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| Writing system | Devanagari | |||||
| Official status | ||||||
| Official language in | India | |||||
| Regulated by | Central Hindi Directorate (India)[2] | |||||
| Language codes | ||||||
| ISO 639-1 | hi | |||||
| ISO 639-2 | hin | |||||
| ISO 639-3 | hin | |||||
| Linguist List | hin-hin | |||||
| Linguasphere | 59-AAF-qf | |||||
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Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi (Devanagari: मानक हिन्दी), High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindi-Urdu language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi. It is an official language of the Republic of India.
Colloquial Hindi is mutually intelligible with another register of Hindi-Urdu called Urdu. Mutual intelligibility decreases in literary and specialized contexts which rely on educated vocabulary. Due to religious nationalism and communal tensions, speakers of both Hindi and Urdu frequently assert that they are distinct languages, despite the fact that native speakers generally cannot tell the colloquial languages apart. The combined population of Hindi-Urdu speakers is the fourth largest in the world.[3] However, the number of native speakers of Standard Hindi is unclear. According to the 2001 Indian census,[4] 258 million people in India reported their native language to be "Hindi". However, this includes large numbers of speakers of Hindi dialects besides Standard Hindi; as of 2009, the best figure Ethnologue could find for Khariboli Hindi was a 1991 citation of 180 million.[1]
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The Constitution of India, adopted in 1950, declares Hindi in the Devanagari script as the official language of India. It should be noted that English continues to be used as an Official language of India along with Hindi. Hindi is also enumerated as one of the twenty-two languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, which entitles it to representation on the Official Language Commission.[5] The Constitution of India has stipulated the usage of Hindi and English to be the two languages of communication for the Central Government. Most of government documentation is prepared in three languages: English, Hindi, and the official state language.
It was envisioned that Hindi would become the sole working language of the central government by 1965 (per directives in Article 344 (2) and Article 351),[6] with state governments being free to function in languages of their own choice. However, widespread resistance movements to the imposition of Hindi on non-native speakers, of especially the people living in south India (such as the Anti-Hindi agitations of Tamil Nadu) led to the passage of the Official Languages Act (1963), which provided for the continued use of English, indefinitely, for all official purposes. Therefore, English is still used in official documents, in courts, etc. However, the constitutional directive to the central government to champion the spread of Hindi was retained and has strongly influenced the policies of the Union government.
At the state level, Hindi is the official language of the following states in India: Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi. Each of these states may also designate a "co-official language"; in Uttar Pradesh for instance, depending on the political formation in power, sometimes this language is Urdu. Similarly, Hindi is accorded the status of co-official language in several states.
The dialect upon which Standard Hindi is based is khariboli, the vernacular of Delhi and the surrounding western Uttar Pradesh and southern Uttarakhand region. This dialect acquired linguistic prestige in the Mughal Empire (17th century) and became known as Urdu, "the language of the court." After independence, the Government of India set about standardising Hindi as a separate language from Urdu, instituting the following conventions:
Standard Hindi derives much of its formal and technical vocabulary from Sanskrit. Standard or shuddh ("pure") Hindi is used only in public addresses and radio or TV news, while the everyday spoken language in most areas is one of several varieties of Hindi-Urdu, whose vocabulary contains many words drawn from Persian and Arabic. In addition, spoken Hindi includes words from English and other languages as well. Hindi is used as the sole official state language in the states of UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, MP, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand etc. Other states like Punjab, West Bengal, Orissa speak/use Hindi beside of their regional/state language. All over North, Central, East & West Indians use Hindi vastly. However, the literary registers differ substantially in borrowed vocabulary; in highly formal situations, the languages are barely intelligible to speakers of the other. Hindi has looked to Sanskrit for borrowings from at least the 19th century, and Urdu has looked to Persian and Arabic for borrowings from the eighteenth century. On another dimension, Hindi is associated with the Hindu community and Urdu with the Muslim community though this is much more a twentieth century phenomenon when the political impetus to actively distinguish Hindi from Urdu gathered pace amongst the educated Hindus driving this change. Prior to this it was the norm for both educated Hindu and Muslim Indians to be fluent in Urdu.
There are five principal categories of words in Standard Hindi:
Similarly, Urdu treats its own vocabulary, borrowed directly from Persian and Arabic, as a separate category for morphological purposes.
Hindi from which much of the Persian, Arabic and English vocabulary has been purged and replaced by tatsam words is called Shuddha Hindi (pure Hindi). Chiefly, the proponents of Hindutva ideology ("Hindu-ness") are vociferous supporters of Shuddha Hindi.
Excessive use of tatsam words creates problems for native speakers. They may have Sanskrit consonant clusters which do not exist in native Hindi. The educated middle class of India may be able to pronounce such words, but others have difficulty. Persian and Arabic vocabulary given 'authentic' pronunciations cause similar difficulty.
Hindi literature, is broadly divided into four prominent forms or styles, being Bhakti (devotional – Kabir, Raskhan); Shringar (beauty – Keshav, Bihari); Veer-Gatha (extolling brave warriors); and Adhunik (modern).
Medieval Hindi literature is marked by the influence of Bhakti movement and the composition of long, epic poems. It was not written in the current dialect but in other Hindi languages, particularly in Avadhi and Braj Bhasha, but later also in Khariboli. During the British Raj, Hindustani became the prestige dialect. Hindustani with heavily Sanskritized vocabulary or Sahityik Hindi (Literary Hindi) was popularized by the writings of Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Bhartendu Harishchandra and others. The rising numbers of newspapers and magazines made Hindustani popular among the educated people. Chandrakanta, written by Devaki Nandan Khatri, is considered the first authentic work of prose in modern Hindi. The person who brought realism in the Hindi prose literature was Munshi Premchand, who is considered as the most revered figure in the world of Hindi fiction and progressive movement......
The Dwivedi Yug ("Age of Dwivedi") in Hindi literature lasted from 1900 to 1918. It is named after Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, who played a major role in establishing the Modern Hindi language in poetry and broadening the acceptable subjects of Hindi poetry from the traditional ones of religion and romantic love.
In the 20th century, Hindi literature saw a romantic upsurge. This is known as Chhayavaad (shadowism) and the literary figures belonging to this school are known as Chhayavaadi. Jaishankar Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala', Mahadevi Varma and Sumitranandan Pant, are the four major Chhayavaadi poets.
Uttar Adhunik is the post-modernist period of Hindi literature, marked by a questioning of early trends that copied the West as well as the excessive ornamentation of the Chhayavaadi movement, and by a return to simple language and natural themes.
The following is a sample text in High Hindi, of the Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (by the United Nations):
Transliteration (IAST):
Transcription (IPA):
Gloss (word-to-word):
Translation (grammatical):
Under the Indian government's encouragement, the officially sponsored version of the Khari-boli dialect has undergone a sea-change after it was declared the language of central government functioning in 1950. A major change has been the Sanskritization of Hindi (introduction of Sanskrit vocabulary in Khariboli). Three factors motivated this conscious bid to sanskritize Hindi, being:
In its non-Sanskritized form, the Khariboli-based dialect is the normal and principal dialect used in the Hindi cinema. It is almost exclusively used in contemporary Hindi television serials, songs, education, and of course, in normal daily speech in almost all the urban regions of north India, wherever Hindi is also the state language. The rural dialect varies from region to region.
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