Apart from the script and formal vocabulary, standard Hindi is mutually intelligible with standard Urdu, another recognised register of Hindustani, as both Hindi and Urdu share a core vocabulary base derived from Prakrit (a descendant of Sanskrit).[20][21][22][23] Hindi is also spoken, to a lesser extent, in other parts of India (usually in a simplified or pidginised variety such as Bazaar Hindustani or Haflong Hindi).[15][16] Outside India, several other languages are recognised officially as "Hindi" but do not refer to the Standard Hindi language described here and instead descend from other nearby languages, such as Awadhi and Bhojpuri. Such languages include Fiji Hindi, which has an official status in Fiji,[24] and Caribbean Hindustani, which is spoken in Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana.[25][26][27][28]
Hindi is the fourth most-spoken first language in the world, after Mandarin, Spanish and English.[29] If counted together with the mutually intelligible Urdu, it is the third most-spoken language in the world, after Mandarin and English.[30][31] According to reports of Ethnologue (2022, 25th edition) Hindi is the third most-spoken language in the world including first and second language speakers.[32]
The term Hindī originally was used to refer to inhabitants of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. It was borrowed from Classical PersianهندیHindī (Iranian Persian pronunciation: Hendi), meaning 'of or belonging to Hind (India)' (hence, 'Indian').[34]
Another name Hindavī (हिन्दवी) or Hinduī (हिन्दुई) (from Persian هندوی 'of or belonging to the Hindu/Indian people') was often used in the past, for example by Amir Khusrau in his poetry.[35][36]
The terms Hindi and Hindu trace back to Old Persian which derived these names from the Sanskrit name Sindhu (सिन्धु), referring to the Indus River. The Greek cognates of the same terms are Indus (for the river) and India (for the land of the river).[37][38]
The term Modern Standard Hindi is commonly used to specifically refer the modern literary Hindi language, as opposed to colloquial and regional varieties that are also referred to as Hindi in a wider sense.[39]
Like other Indo-Aryan languages, Hindi is a direct descendant of an early form of Vedic Sanskrit, through Shauraseni Prakrit and Śauraseni Apabhraṃśa (from Sanskrit apabhraṃśa "corrupt"), which emerged in the 7th century CE.[40]
The sound changes that characterised the transition from Middle Indo-Aryan to Hindi are:[41]
Compensatory lengthening of vowels preceding geminate consonants, sometimes with spontaneous nasalisation: Skt. hasta "hand" > Pkt. hattha > hāth
Loss of all word-final vowels: rātri "night" > rattī > rāt
Formation of nasalised long vowels from nasal consonants (-VNC- > -V̄̃C-): bandha "bond" > bā̃dh
Loss of unaccented or unstressed short vowels (reflected in schwa deletion): susthira "firm" > sutthira > suthrā
Collapsing of adjacent vowels (including separated by a hiatus: apara "other" > avara > aur
Final -m to -ṽ: grāma "village" > gāma > gāṽ
Intervocalic -ḍ- to -ṛ- or -l-: taḍāga "pond" > talāv, naḍa "reed" > nal.
Standard Hindi is based on the language that was spoken in the Ganges-Yamuna Doab (Delhi, Meerut and Saharanpur) called Khariboli;[40][56] the vernacular of Delhi and the surrounding region came to replace earlier prestige languages such as Awadhi and Braj. Standard Hindi was developed by supplanting foreign loanwords from the Hindustani language and replacing them with Sanskrit words, though Standard Hindi does continue to possess several Persian loanwords.[57][58][59] Modern Hindi became a literary language in the 19th century. Earliest examples could be found as Prēm Sāgar by Lallu Lal, Batiyāl Pachīsī of Sadal Misra, and Rānī Kētakī Kī Kahānī of Insha Allah Khan which were published in Devanagari script during the early 19th century.[60]
John Gilchrist was principally known for his study of the Hindustani language, which was adopted as the lingua franca of northern India (including what is now present-day Pakistan) by British colonists and indigenous people. He compiled and authored An English-Hindustani Dictionary, A Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language, The Oriental Linguist, and many more. His lexicon of Hindustani was published in the Perso-Arabic script, Nāgarī script, and in Roman transliteration.In the late 19th century, a movement to further develop Hindi as a standardised form of Hindustani separate from Urdu took form.[61] In 1881, Bihar accepted Hindi as its sole official language, replacing Urdu, and thus became the first state of India to adopt Hindi.[62] However, in 2014, Urdu was accorded second official language status in the state.[63]
Independent India
After independence, the Government of India instituted the following conventions:[original research?]
Standardisation of grammar: In 1954, the Government of India set up a committee to prepare a grammar of Hindi; The committee's report was released in 1958 as A Basic Grammar of Modern Hindi.[64]
Standardisation of the orthography, using the Devanagari script, by the Central Hindi Directorate of the Ministry of Education and Culture to bring about uniformity in writing, to improve the shape of some Devanagari characters, and introducing diacritics to express sounds from other languages.
Part XVII of the Indian Constitution deals with the official language of the Indian Union. Under Article 343, the official languages of the Union have been prescribed, which includes Hindi in Devanagari script and English:
(1) The official language of the Union shall be Hindi in Devanagari script. The form of numerals to be used for the official purposes of the Union shall be the international form of Indian numerals.[25]
(2) Notwithstanding anything in clause (1), for a period of fifteen years from the commencement of this Constitution, the English language shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union for which it was being used immediately before such commencement: Provided that the President may, during the said period, by order authorise the use of the Hindi language in addition to the English language and of the Devanagari form of numerals in addition to the international form of Indian numerals for any of the official purposes of the Union.[70]
It shall be the duty of the Union to promote the spread of the Hindi language, to develop it so that it may serve as a medium of expression for all the elements of the composite culture of India and to secure its enrichment by assimilating without interfering with its genius, the forms, style and expressions used in Hindustani and in the other languages of India specified in the Eighth Schedule, and by drawing, wherever necessary or desirable, for its vocabulary, primarily on Sanskrit and secondarily on other languages.
It was envisioned that Hindi would become the sole working language of the Union Government by 1965 (per directives in Article 344 (2) and Article 351),[71] with state governments being free to function in the language of their own choice. However, widespread resistance to the imposition of Hindi on non-native speakers, especially in South India (such as those in Tamil Nadu) led to the passage of the Official Languages Act of 1963, which provided for the continued use of English indefinitely for all official purposes, although the constitutional directive for the Union Government to encourage the spread of Hindi was retained and has strongly influenced its policies.[72]
Article 344 (2b) stipulates that the official language commission shall be constituted every ten years to recommend steps for the progressive use of Hindi language and impose restrictions on the use of the English language by the union government. In practice, the official language commissions are constantly endeavouring to promote Hindi but not imposing restrictions on English in official use by the union government.
Although there is no specification of a national language in the constitution, it is a widely held belief that Hindi is the national language of India. This is often a source of friction and contentious debate.[78][79][80] In 2010, the Gujarat High Court clarified that Hindi is not the national language of India because the constitution does not mention it as such.[81][82]
Hindi is spoken as a first language by about 77,569 people in Nepal according to the 2011 Nepal census, and further by 1,225,950 people as a second language.[87] A Hindi proponent, Indian-born Paramananda Jha, was elected vice-president of Nepal. He took his oath of office in Hindi in July 2008. This created protests in the streets for 5 days; students burnt his effigies, and there was a general strike in 22 districts. Nepal Supreme Court ruled in 2009 that his oath in Hindi was invalid and he was kept "inactive" as vice-president. An "angry" Jha said, "I cannot be compelled to take the oath now in Nepali. I might rather take it in English."[88]
South Africa
Hindi is a protected language in South Africa. According to the Constitution of South Africa, the Pan South African Language Board must promote and ensure respect for Hindi along with other languages.[6] According to a doctoral dissertation by Rajend Mesthrie in 1985, although Hindi and other Indian languages have existed in South Africa for the last 125 years, there are no academic studies of any of them – of their use in South Africa, their evolution and current decline.[89]
United Arab Emirates
Hindi is adopted as the third official court language in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi.[7] As a result of this status, the Indian workforce in UAE can file their complaints to the labour courts in the country in their own mother-tongue.[90]
In Northeast India a pidgin known as Haflong Hindi has developed as a lingua franca for the people living in Haflong, Assam who speak other languages natively.[91] In Arunachal Pradesh, Hindi emerged as a lingua franca among locals who speak over 50 dialects natively.[92]
Hindi is quite easy to understand for many Pakistanis, who speak Urdu, which, like Hindi, is a standard register of the Hindustani language; additionally, Indian media are widely viewed in Pakistan.[93]
A sizeable population in Afghanistan, especially in Kabul, can also speak and understand Hindi-Urdu due to the popularity and influence of Bollywood films, songs and actors in the region.[94][95]
Hindi is also spoken by a large population of Madheshis (people having roots in north-India but having migrated to Nepal over hundreds of years) of Nepal. Apart from this, Hindi is spoken by the large Indian diaspora which hails from, or has its origin from the "Hindi Belt" of India. A substantially large North Indian diaspora lives in countries like the United States of America, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, South Africa, Fiji and Mauritius, where it is natively spoken at home and among their own Hindustani-speaking communities. Outside India, Hindi speakers are 8 million in Nepal; 863,077 in the United States of America;[96][97] 450,170 in Mauritius; 380,000 in Fiji;[83] 250,292 in South Africa; 150,000 in Suriname;[98] 100,000 in Uganda; 45,800 in the United Kingdom;[99] 20,000 in New Zealand; 20,000 in Germany; 26,000 in Trinidad and Tobago;[98] 3,000 in Singapore.
Hindi is written in the Devanagari script, an abugida. Devanagari consists of 11 vowels and 33 consonants and is written from left to right. Unlike Sanskrit, Devanagari is not entirely phonetic for Hindi, especially failing to mark schwa deletion in spoken Standard Hindi.[106]
Romanised Hindi, also called Hinglish, is the dominant form of Hindi online. In an analysis of YouTube comments, Palakodety et al., identified that 52% of comments were in Romanised Hindi, 46% in English, and 1% in Devanagari Hindi.[5]
Traditionally, Hindi words are divided into five principal categories according to their etymology:
Tatsam (तत्सम transl. "same as that") words: These are words which are spelled the same in Hindi as in Sanskrit (except for the absence of final case inflections).[118] They include words inherited from Sanskrit via Prakrit which have survived without modification (e.g. Hindi नामnām / Sanskrit नामnāma, "name",[119] as well as forms borrowed directly from Sanskrit in more modern times (e.g. प्रार्थनाprārthanā, "prayer").[120] Pronunciation, however, conforms to Hindi norms and may differ from that of classical Sanskrit. Amongst nouns, the tatsam word could be the Sanskrit non-inflected word-stem, or it could be the nominative singular form in the Sanskrit nominal declension.
Ardhatatsam (अर्धतत्सम transl. "semi-tatsama") words: Such words are typically earlier loanwords from Sanskrit which have undergone sound changes subsequent to being borrowed. (e.g. Hindi सूरजsūraj from Sanskrit सूर्यsūrya)
Tadbhav (तद्भव transl. "born of that") words: These are native Hindi words derived from Sanskrit after undergoing phonological rules (e.g. Sanskrit कर्मkarma, "deed" becomes Shauraseni Prakritकम्मkamma, and eventually Hindi कामkām, "work") and are spelled differently from Sanskrit.[118]
Deshaj (देशज transl. "of the country") words: These are words that were not borrowings from non-indigenous languages but do not derive from attested Indo-Aryan words either. Belonging to this category are onomatopoetic words or ones borrowed from local non-Indo-Aryan languages.
Videshī (विदेशी transl. "foreign") words: These include all loanwords from non-indigenous languages. The most frequent source languages in this category are Persian, Arabic, English and Portuguese. Examples are क़िलाqila "fort" from Persian, कमेटीkameṭī from English committee.
Prakrit
Hindi has naturally inherited a large portion of its vocabulary from Shauraseni Prakrit, in the form of tadbhava words.[21] This process usually involves compensatory lengthening of vowels preceding consonant clusters in Prakrit, e.g. Sanskrit tīkṣṇa > Prakrit tikkha > Hindi tīkhā.
Sanskrit
Much of Standard Hindi's vocabulary is borrowed from Sanskrit as tatsam borrowings, especially in technical and academic fields. The formal Hindi standard, from which much of the Persian, Arabic and English vocabulary has been replaced by neologisms compounding tatsam words, is called Śuddh Hindi (pure Hindi), and is viewed as a more prestigious dialect over other more colloquial forms of Hindi.
Excessive use of tatsam words sometimes creates problems for native speakers. They may have Sanskrit consonant clusters which do not exist in Hindustani, causing difficulties in pronunciation.[121]
As a part of the process of Sanskritisation, new words are coined using Sanskrit components to be used as replacements for supposedly foreign vocabulary. Usually these neologisms are calques of English words already adopted into spoken Hindi. Some terms such as dūrbhāṣ "telephone", literally "far-speech" and dūrdarśan "television", literally "far-sight" have even gained some currency in formal Hindi in the place of the English borrowings (ṭeli)fon and ṭīvī.[122]
Persian
Hindi also features significant Persian influence, standardised from spoken Hindustani.[57][39][page needed] Early borrowings, beginning in the mid-12th century, were specific to Islam (e.g. Muhammad, Islām) and so Persian was simply an intermediary for Arabic. Later, under the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire, Persian became the primary administrative language in the Hindi heartland. Persian borrowings reached a heyday in the 17th century, pervading all aspects of life. Even grammatical constructs, namely the izafat, were assimilated into Hindi.[123]
The status of Persian language then and thus its influence, is also visible in Hindi proverbs:
हाथ कंगन को आरसी क्या,
पढ़े लिखे को फ़ारसी क्या।
Hāth kaṅgan ko ārsī kyā,
Paṛhe likhe ko Fārsī kyā.
What is mirror to a hand with bangles,
What is Persian to a literate.
The emergence of Modern Standard Hindi in the 19th century went along with the Sanskritisation of its vocabulary,[124] leading to a marginalisation of Persian vocabulary in Hindi, which continued after Partition when the Indian government co-opted the policy of Sanskritisation. However, many Persian words (e.g. bas "enough", khud "self") have remained entrenched in Standard Hindi, and a larger amount are still used in Urdu poetry written in the Devanagari script. Many words borrowed from Persian in turn were loanwords from Arabic (e.g. muśkil "difficult", havā "air", x(a)yāl "thought", kitāb "book").
Hindi literature is broadly divided into four prominent forms or styles, being Bhakti (devotional – Kabir, Raskhan); Śṛṇgār (beauty – Keshav, Bihari); Vīgāthā (epic); and Ādhunik (modern).
Medieval Hindi literature is marked by the influence of Bhakti movement and the composition of long, epic poems. It was primarily written in other varieties of Hindi, particularly Avadhi and Braj Bhasha, but to a degree also in Delhavi, the basis for Standard Hindi. During the British Raj, Hindustani became the prestige dialect.
Chandrakanta, written by Devaki Nandan Khatri in 1888, is considered the first authentic work of prose in modern Hindi.[127] The person who brought realism in Hindi prose literature was Munshi Premchand, who is considered the most revered figure in the world of Hindi fiction and progressive movement. Literary, or Sāhityik, Hindi was popularised by the writings of Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Bhartendu Harishchandra and others. The rising numbers of newspapers and magazines made Hindustani popular with educated people.[citation needed]
The Dvivedī 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 Standard Hindi in poetry and broadening the acceptable subjects of Hindi poetry from the traditional ones of religion and romantic love.
Uttar Ādhunik 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 Chāyāvādī movement, and by a return to simple language and natural themes.
Internet
Hindi literature, music, and film have all been disseminated via the internet. In 2015, Google reported a 94% increase in Hindi-content consumption year-on-year, adding that 21% of users in India prefer content in Hindi.[128] Many Hindi newspapers also offer digital editions.
अनुच्छेद १(एक): सभी मनुष्य जन्म से स्वतन्त्र तथा मर्यादा और अधिकारों में समान होते हैं। वे तर्क और विवेक से सम्पन्न हैं तथा उन्हें भ्रातृत्व की भावना से परस्पर के प्रति कार्य करना चाहिए।
Article 1 (one) – All humans birth from independent and dignity and rights in equal are. They logic and conscience from endowed are and they fraternity in the spirit of each other towards work should.
Translation (grammatical)
Article 1 – All humans are born independent and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with logic and conscience and they should work towards each other in the spirit of fraternity.
^Urdu transliteration. The Hindi variant is usually written as एतबार (etbār). Rekhta Dictionary transliterates this term as ए'तिबार (e'tibār) in Devanagari.[109]
^ abcChatterji, Suniti Kumar; Siṃha, Udaẏa Nārāẏana; Padikkal, Shivarama (1997). Suniti Kumar Chatterji: a centenary tribute. Sahitya Akademi. ISBN978-81-260-0353-2. High Hindi written in Devanagari, having identical grammar with Urdu, employing the native Hindi or Hindustani (Prakrit) elements to the fullest, but for words of high culture, going to Sanskrit. Hindustani proper that represents the basic Khari Boli with vocabulary holding a balance between Urdu and High Hindi.
^Yoon, Bogum; Pratt, Kristen L., eds. (15 January 2023). Primary Language Impact on Second Language and Literacy Learning. Lexington Books. p. 198. In terms of cross-linguistic relations, Urdu's combinations of Arabic-Persian orthography and Sanskrit linguistic roots provides interesting theoretical as well as practical comparisons demonstrated in table 12.1.
^"Ties between Urdu & Sanskrit deeply rooted: Scholar". The Times of India. 12 March 2024. Retrieved 8 May 2024. The linguistic and cultural ties between Sanskrit and Urdu are deeply rooted and significant, said Ishtiaque Ahmed, registrar, Maula Azad National Urdu University during a two-day workshop titled "Introduction to Sanskrit for Urdu medium students". Ahmed said a substantial portion of Urdu's vocabulary and cultural capital, as well as its syntactic structure, is derived from Sanskrit.
^Richard K. Barz (8 May 2007). "The cultural significance of Hindi in Mauritius". South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies. 3: 1–13. doi:10.1080/00856408008722995.
^Mikael Parkvall, "Världens 100 största språk 2007" (The World's 100 Largest Languages in 2007), in Nationalencyklopedin. Asterisks mark the 2010 estimatesArchived 11 November 2012 at the Wayback Machine for the top dozen languages.
^Chapman, Graham. "Religious vs. regional determinism: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as inheritors of empire." Shared space: Divided space. Essays on conflict and territorial organization (1990): 106–134.
^"Women of the Indian Sub-Continent: Makings of a Culture – Rekhta Foundation". Google Arts & Culture. Retrieved 25 February 2020. The "Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb" is one such instance of the composite culture that marks various regions of the country. Prevalent in the North, particularly in the central plains, it is born of the union between the Hindu and Muslim cultures. Most of the temples were lined along the Ganges and the Khanqah (Sufi school of thought) were situated along the Yamuna river (also called Jamuna). Thus, it came to be known as the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, with the word "tehzeeb" meaning culture. More than communal harmony, its most beautiful by-product was "Hindustani" which later gave us the Hindi and Urdu languages.
^Matthews, David John; Shackle, C.; Husain, Shahanara (1985). Urdu literature. Urdu Markaz; Third World Foundation for Social and Economic Studies. ISBN978-0-907962-30-4. But with the establishment of Muslim rule in Delhi, it was the Old Hindi of this area which came to form the major partner with Persian. This variety of Hindi is called Khari Boli, 'the upright speech'.
^Dhulipala, Venkat (2000). The Politics of Secularism: Medieval Indian Historiography and the Sufis. University of Wisconsin–Madison. p. 27. Persian became the court language, and many Persian words crept into popular usage. The composite culture of northern India, known as the Ganga Jamuni tehzeeb was a product of the interaction between Hindu society and Islam.
^Indian Journal of Social Work, Volume 4. Tata Institute of Social Sciences. 1943. p. 264. ... more words of Sanskrit origin but 75% of the vocabulary is common. It is also admitted that while this language is known as Hindustani, ... Muslims call it Urdu and the Hindus call it Hindi. ... Urdu is a national language evolved through years of Hindu and Muslim cultural contact and, as stated by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, is essentially an Indian language and has no place outside.
^Mody, Sujata Sudhakar (2008). Literature, Language, and Nation Formation: The Story of a Modern Hindi Journal 1900–1920. University of California, Berkeley. p. 7. ...Hindustani, Rekhta, and Urdu as later names of the old Hindi (a.k.a. Hindavi).
^Kesavan, B. S. (1997). History Of Printing And Publishing In India. National Book Trust, India. p. 31. ISBN978-81-237-2120-0. It might be useful to recall here that Old Hindi or Hindavi, which was a naturally Persian- mixed language in the largest measure, has played this role before, as we have seen, for five or six centuries.
^Hans Henrich Hock (1991). Principles of Historical Linguistics. Walter de Gruyter. p. 475. ISBN978-3-11-012962-5. During the time of British rule, Hindi (in its religiously neutral, 'Hindustani' variety) increasingly came to be the symbol of national unity over against the English of the foreign oppressor. And Hindustani was learned widely throughout India, even in Bengal and the Dravidian south. ... Independence had been accompanied by the division of former British India into two countries, Pakistan and India. The former had been established as a Muslim state and had made Urdu, the Muslim variety of Hindi–Urdu or Hindustani, its national language.
^Masica, Colin P. (1993). The Indo-Aryan Languages. Cambridge University Press. pp. 430 (Appendix I). ISBN978-0-521-29944-2. Hindustani - term referring to common colloquial base of HINDI and URDU and to its function as lingua franca over much of India, much in vogue during Independence movement as expression of national unity; after Partition in 1947 and subsequent linguistic polarization it fell into disfavor; census of 1951 registered an enormous decline (86–98 per cent) in no. of persons declaring it their mother tongue (the majority of HINDI speakers and many URDU speakers had done so in previous censuses); trend continued in subsequent censuses: only 11,053 returned it in 1971...mostly from S India; [see Khubchandani 1983: 90–1].
^Ashmore, Harry S. (1961). Encyclopaedia Britannica: a new survey of universal knowledge, Volume 11. Encyclopædia Britannica. p. 579. The everyday speech of well over 50,000,000 persons of all communities in the north of India and in West Pakistan is the expression of a common language, Hindustani.
^Hiro, Dilip (2015). The Longest August: The Unflinching Rivalry Between India and Pakistan. PublicAffairs. p. 398. ISBN978-1-56858-503-1. Spoken Hindi is akin to spoken Urdu, and that language is often called Hindustani. Bollywood's screenplays are written in Hindustani.
^Students' Britannica India. Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2000. p. 299. Hindustani developed as lingua franca in the medieval ages in and around Delhi, Meerut and Saharanpur because of the interaction between the speakers of Khariboli (a dialect developed in this region out of Shauraseni Prakrit) and the speakers of Persian , Turkish , and various dialects of Arabic who migrated to North India. Initially it was known by various names such as Rekhta (mixed), Urdu (language of the camp) and Hindvi or Hindustani (language of Hindustan). Though Khariboli supplied its basic vocabulary and grammar, it borrowed quite a lot of words from Persian and Arabic
^ abcJain, Danesh; Cardona, George (2007). The Indo-Aryan Languages. Routledge. ISBN978-1-135-79711-9. The primary sources of non-IA loans into MSH are Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, Turkic and English. Conversational registers of Hindi/Urdu (not to mentioned formal registers of Urdu) employ large numbers of Persian and Arabic loanwords, although in Sanskritized registers many of these words are replaced by tatsama forms from Sanskrit. The Persian and Arabic lexical elements in Hindi result from the effects of centuries of Islamic administrative rule over much of north India in the centuries before the establishment of British rule in India. Although it is conventional to differentiate among Persian and Arabic loan elements into Hindi/Urdu, in practice it is often difficult to separate these strands from one another. The Arabic (and also Turkic) lexemes borrowed into Hindi frequently were mediated through Persian, as a result of which a thorough intertwining of Persian and Arabic elements took place, as manifest by such phenomena as hybrid compounds and compound words. Moreover, although the dominant trajectory of lexical borrowing was from Arabic into Persian, and thence into Hindi/Urdu, examples can be found of words that in origin are actually Persian loanwords into both Arabic and Hindi/Urdu.
^Nalankilli, Thanjai. "Hindi in Nepal – An Analysis". Tamiltribune.com. Archived from the original on 18 March 2016. Retrieved 17 December 2022.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
^Hakala, Walter N. (2012). "Languages as a Key to Understanding Afghanistan's Cultures"(PDF). National Geographic. Archived from the original(PDF) on 14 March 2018. Retrieved 13 March 2018. In the 1980s and '90s, at least three million Afghans—mostly Pashtun—fled to Pakistan, where a substantial number spent several years being exposed to Hindi- and Urdu-language media, especially Bollywood films and songs, and being educated in Urdu-language schools, both of which contributed to the decline of Dari, even among urban Pashtuns.
^Krishnamurthy, Rajeshwari (28 June 2013). "Kabul Diary: Discovering the Indian connection". Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations. Retrieved 13 March 2018. Most Afghans in Kabul understand and/or speak Hindi, thanks to the popularity of Indian cinema in the country.
^ abKuiper, Kathleen (2010). The Culture of India. Rosen Publishing. ISBN978-1-61530-149-2. Urdu is closely related to Hindi, a language that originated and developed in the Indian subcontinent. They share the same Indic base and are so similar in phonology and grammar that they appear to be one language.
^Bhatia, Tej K. (1987). A History of the Hindi Grammatical Tradition: Hindi-Hindustani Grammar, Grammarians, History and Problems. Brill. ISBN9789004079243.
^ abcdefghHindi and Urdu contrast dental [t] and [d] with apical postalveolar [ʈ] and [ɖ] (as well as aspirated variants). Both sets sound like /t/ and /d/ to most English speakers although the dental [t] and [d] are used in place of the English /θ/ and /ð/ for some speakers with th-stopping.
^In a number of words, the ع and/or ء is sometimes pronounced as ʔ in Urdu, which is typically not represented or pronounced in Hindi, except when the Urdu variant is transliterated into Hindi.
^ abcdeMainly phonemes of Urdu. Hindi speakers may replace [x], [z], [ʒ], [ɣ] and [q] with [kʰ], [dʒ], [dʒʱ], [g] and [k] respectively.
^ abMainly phonemes of Hindi. Urdu speakers usually replace [ɳ] and [ʂ] with [n] and [ʃ] respectively.
^ ab/ɾ/ can surface as a trill [r] in word-initial and syllable-final positions. Geminate /ɾː/ is always a trill.
^ ab[w] occurs as an allophone of [ʋ] when /वو/ is in an onglide position between an onset consonant and a following vowel while [ʋ], which may phonetically be [v], occurs otherwise.
^Morelli, Sarah (20 December 2019). A Guru’s Journey: Pandit Chitresh Das and Indian Classical Dance in Diaspora. University of Illinois Press. ISBN978-0-252-05172-2. Hindi has a nasal sound roughly equivalent to the n in the English sang, transliterated here as ṅ or ṁ, and has two slightly differing sh sounds, transliterated as ś and ṣ. ... A few words contain consonants…from Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, and English: क़ (ق) is transliterated as q, ख़ (خ) as kh, ग़ (غ) as g, ज़ (ظ ,ز, or ض) as z, झ़ (ژ) as zh, and फ़ (ف) as f.
^Pandey, Dipti; Mondal, Tapabrata; Agrawal, S. S.; Bangalore, Srinivas (2013). "Development and suitability of Indian languages speech database for building watson based ASR system". 2013 International Conference Oriental COCOSDA held jointly with 2013 Conference on Asian Spoken Language Research and Evaluation (O-COCOSDA/CASLRE). p. 3. doi:10.1109/ICSDA.2013.6709861. ISBN978-1-4799-2378-6. S2CID26461938. Only in Hindi 10 Phonemes व /v/ क़ /q/ ञ /ɲ/ य /j/ ष /ʂ/ ख़ /x/ ग़ /ɣ/ ज़ /z/ झ़ /ʒ/ फ़ /f/
^[ɛ] occurs as an allophone of /ə/ near an /ɦ/ that is surrounded on both sides by schwas. Usually, the second schwa becomes silent, which results in an [ɛ] preceding an /ɦ/.
Ohala, Manjari (1999). "Hindi". In International Phonetic Association (ed.). Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: a Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Cambridge University Press. pp. 100–103. ISBN978-0-521-63751-0.
Shapiro, Michael C. (2001). "Hindi". In Garry, Jane; Rubino, Carl (eds.). An encyclopedia of the world's major languages, past and present. New England Publishing Associates. pp. 305–309.
Shapiro, Michael C. (2003). "Hindi". In Cardona, George; Jain, Dhanesh (eds.). The Indo-Aryan Languages. Routledge. pp. 250–285. ISBN978-0-415-77294-5.
