Hindi: A Modern Indo-Aryan Language of North India

Hindi belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family, developing from Sanskrit-derived Prakrit and later Apabhramsha vernaculars spoken across the Gangetic plain, and stands in a close historical relationship with Urdu, with which it shares essentially the same spoken grammar and much everyday vocabulary while diverging in script, Hindi using the Devanagari abugida and Urdu the Perso-Arabic script, and in higher vocabulary register, Hindi drawing more heavily on Sanskrit and Urdu on Persian and Arabic, a divergence that hardened along religious and political lines particularly around the 1947 partition of British India.

Modern Standard Hindi was substantially codified in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries partly through Hindu religious and nationalist literary movements seeking a Sanskritized register distinct from the more Persianized courtly Hindustani that had dominated North Indian administration under Mughal and subsequent rule, and Hindi became independent India's primary official language at the national level in 1950, alongside English and numerous constitutionally recognized regional languages. Hindi's Devanagari script, also used for Sanskrit and Marathi, is an abugida in which consonant characters carry an inherent vowel modified by attached diacritic marks, a system directly descended from the ancient Brahmi script that also underlies most other Indic scripts used across South and Southeast Asia.