Hindi

Where Hindi and Urdu part

Apart from script and formal vocabulary, Modern Standard Hindi and standard Urdu are mutually intelligible, and their common base is called Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu. Hindustani took shape under the Delhi Sultanate, when Persian loanwords entered the Sanskrit and Prakrit base of Old Hindi. The standard was then built by replacing many of those loans with Sanskrit words, though several Persian ones remain. A movement in the late 19th century pushed for Hindi as a standard apart from Urdu, and in 1881 Bihar became the first state to adopt it as its sole official language.

How Sanskrit sounds wore down

Hindi descends from an early form of Vedic Sanskrit through Shauraseni Prakrit and Apabhraṃśa, which emerged in the 7th century. Along the way final vowels fell away and vowels lengthened before double consonants: Sanskrit hasta, hand, became Prakrit hattha and Hindi hāth; rātri, night, became rāt; grāma, village, became gāṽ. Modern Hindi became a literary language in the 19th century, with early prose such as Prēm Sāgar by Lallu Lal printed in Devanagari.

Why English was never phased out

Article 343 of the constitution names Hindi in Devanagari as the official language of the Union and allowed English for fifteen years. Resistance to Hindi in South India, especially Tamil Nadu, led to the Official Languages Act of 1963, which keeps English in official use indefinitely. The constitution names no national language, and in 2010 the Gujarat High Court said so. Hindi is official in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, beside Gujarati in Gujarat, and in Delhi and other union territories.

How Devanagari hides a vowel

Devanagari, an abugida written left to right, has 11 vowels and 33 consonants. It does not mark the schwa that spoken Hindi drops, so the letters are not a perfect guide to pronunciation.