From origin to speakers, we tell you some unknown facts about the language
Hindi (written in Devanagari script) is the official language of India and it was adopted by the Constituent Assembly in 1949. In fact, to mark the same, September 14 is celebrated as Hindi Diwas. For the unversed, it got its name from the Persian word Hind, which means 'land of the Indus River'.
Here are some lesser known facts about Hindi:
It came from Hindustani that is spoken in North India but it was only standardized in the 19th century together with Urdu. These languages have many similarities and hence, are considered to be the variants of the original language, Hindustani.
It is the fourth most spoken language in the world and you will find many speakers in Northern India apart from foreign countries like Nepal, Trinidad and Tobago, the United States and the United Kingdom.
The Hindi language has gifted a lot of words to the English language. Some of them include Avatar, Bungalow, Dungaree, Khaki, Yoga, Shampoo and many more.
While Hindi is easy to speak, the Hindi grammar can be difficult because all the nouns have genders and hence, the verbs and adjectives also change. However, there are no articles in the Hindi grammar so you need to skip ”the,” ”an” or ”a” when writing or speaking.
Hindi is also easy to pronounce as each letter in the language has a sound. Just like Spanish, they are spoken as they are written in Hindi.
This language uses the Devanagari script, which originates from the Brāhmī script, which was developed between the 1st and 4th centuries CE. It has 11 vowels and 33 consonants, and the alphabetical table of Hindi is called Varnmala.
While making an English sentence, you follow the Subject-Verb-Object or SOV structure. However, in Hindi writing and speaking, the verb and auxiliary verb are placed at the end. So you just cannot translate word by word from English to Hindi.
The first state to choose Hindi as their own official language was Bihar.
The first written record of Hindi was “Vikramorvashiyam in Apabhramsa”, a play which was written by an Indian playwright, Kalidas, in 400 AD.
India’s Father of the Nation, Mahatma Gandhi, used Hindi as the collective voice of India, both for protest and communication.
Spoken Hindi has several regional variants, such as standard Hindi, Nagari Hindi, literary Hindi and high Hindi.
