Hindi

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.

Hindi carries an enormous body of modern Hindu devotional literature and practice, including widely used Hindi translations and popular retellings of Sanskrit epics and the Bhagavad Gita, Hindi-language bhajans and kirtan devotional singing performed at temples and gatherings across North India and the Hindi-speaking diaspora, and a large contemporary religious broadcasting and publishing industry, including televised discourses by popular modern gurus and religious teachers that reach audiences across India and internationally through satellite and streaming media.

Hindi is closely related to, though distinct from, Awadhi, the medieval language of Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas, one of the most influential works of Hindu devotional literature, and modern Hindi versions and adaptations of that text, alongside the Sanskrit Ramayana it retells, remain central to popular Hindu religious education and performance, including the annual Ramlila theatrical reenactments performed in Hindi and regional languages across North India. Hindi also serves as a significant language of modern Sikh devotional publishing and commentary outside the Punjabi-language Guru Granth Sahib itself, given the substantial Hindi-speaking Sikh diaspora and readership across northern India.