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Hindi

Indo-Aryan language spoken in India

Modern Standard Hindi (Hindi: आधुनिक मानक हिन्दी, romanised: Ādhunik Mānak Hindī), commonly referred to as Hindi, is an Indo-Aryan language written in the Devanagari script. It is an official language of the government of India, and is the lingua franca for most of the northern half of India. Hindi is an official language in ten states (Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand), and six union territories (Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Delhi, Chandigarh, Dadra and Nagar Haveli and Daman and Diu, Ladakh and Jammu and Kashmir) and an additional official language in the state of West Bengal. Hindi is also one of the 22 scheduled languages of the Republic of India. Apart from the script and formal vocabulary, Modern Standard Hindi is mutually intelligible with standard Urdu. The common base of the two languages is sometimes referred to as Hindi–Urdu or Hindustani, and Hindi is considered a Sanskritised register of Hindustani. 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). 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. Examples of this are Bhojpuri-Hindustani, which is spoken in South Africa and Mauritius; Fiji Hindi, spoken in Fiji; and Caribbean Hindustani, spoken in Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana. Hindi is the fourth-most-spoken first language in the world, after Mandarin, Spanish, and English. When counted together with the mutually intelligible Urdu, it is the third-most-spoken language in the world, after Mandarin and English. According to reports of Ethnologue (2025), Hindi is the third most-spoken language in the world when including first and second language speakers. Hindi is the fastest-growing language of India, followed by Kashmiri, Meitei, Gujarati and Bengali, according to the 2011 census of India.