Hindi languages
The Hindi languages, also known as Madhya and the Central Zone of the Indo-Aryan languages, is a subset of the varieties of Hindi spoken across northern India that descend from the Madhya prakrits, and includes the official languages of India and Pakistan, Hindi and Urdu. The coherence of this group depends on the classification being used; here we will consider only Eastern and Western Hindi.
Languages
If there can be considered a consensus within the dialectology of Hindi proper, it is that it can be split into two sets of dialects: Western and Eastern Hindi.[1] This analysis excludes varieties sometimes claimed for Hindi, such as Bihari, Rajasthani, and Pahari.[2] Thus Hindi proper includes[3]
- Western Hindi (of which Sauraseni is the immediate precursor[4]):
- Braj, spoken in western Uttar Pradesh and adjacent districts of Rajasthan and Hariyana.
- Haryanvi or Bangaru, spoken in the states of Haryana and Delhi.
- Bundeli or Bundelkhandi, spoken in west-central Madhya Pradesh.
- Kannauji, spoken in west-central Uttar Pradesh.
- Kauravi or Vernacular Hindustani, spoken to the north and northeast of Delhi.
- Khari boli, the standard dialect, generally identified with the grammatical core of Kauravi (vernacular Hindustani), but displaying features of other dialects and adjacent languages, as well as non-Indo-Aryan languages such as Persian. It forms the basis of the Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) language, with its standard registers of Modern Standard Hindi and Urdu.
- Eastern Hindi (of which Ardhamagadhi is the immediate precursor[4])
- Awadhi, spoken in north and north-central Uttar Pradesh and in Fiji.
- Bagheli, spoken in north-central Madhya Pradesh and central Uttar Pradesh.
- Chattisgarhi, spoken in southeast Madhya Pradesh and northern and central Chattisgarh.
Use in culturally non-Hindi regions in the subcontinent
- Urdu is the official language of Pakistan. Although only the native language of 7% of the population, it is nearly universal as a second language.
- Bambaiya Hindi, the dialect of the city of Bombay (Mumbai); it is based on Hindustani but heavily influenced by Marathi and Gujarati. Technically it is a pidgin, i.e., neither is it a mother language of any people nor is it used in formal settings by the educated and upper social strata. However, it is often used in the movies of Hindi cinema (Bollywood) because Mumbai is the base of the Bollywood film industry.
- Dakhni, a dialect of Urdu spoken in Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh.
- Kalkatiya Hindi, a Khariboli-based pidgin spoken in the city of Calcutta (Kolkata), Shillong, etc., heavily influenced by Bhojpuri and Bengali.
References
Bibliography
- Shapiro, Michael C. (2003), "Hindi", in Cardona, George; Jain, Dhanesh, The Indo-Aryan Languages, Routledge, pp. 250–285, ISBN 9780415772945, http://books.google.com/books?id=jPR2OlbTbdkC&pg=PA250&dq=indo-aryan&sig=cUNurxJKkTLfKf8uiMd7pWX2RC0