Concept
Hindi
Overview
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.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Whenever this is done, what is now sensible may be called a "sign" or "symbol," and that of which it is intended to call up the "idea" may be called its "meaning." This is a rough outline of what constitutes "meaning." But we must fill in the outline in various ways. And, since we are concerned with what is called "thought," we must pay more attention than we otherwise should do to the private as opposed to the…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
States what Hindi is; the author is tied to Hindi in the knowledge graph.
Hence it was supposed that, ultimately, there can be no such entities as relations between things. Hence either there can be only one thing in the universe, or, if there are many things, they cannot possibly interact in any way, since any interaction would be a relation, and relations are impossible. The first of these views, advocated by Spinoza and held in our own day by Bradley and many other philosophers, is…
Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
States what Hindi is; the author is tied to Hindi in the knowledge graph.
This is indicated primarily by the fact that these languages lack what we would call grammatical categories. As regards this point, Westermann's grammar of the Ewe language is in entire agreement with the much earlier results which Steinthal reached in his investigation of the Manda language, which is also of the Soudan region. These languages consist of monosyllabic words which follow one another in direct…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
States what Hindi is.
Philosophers who discussed Hindi
- Gujarati language
- Short story
- Muhammad Iqbal
- Bertrand Russell
- Champat Rai Jain
- Osho
- Rajasthani languages
- Hammalawa Saddhatissa
- Rajneesh movement
Related ideas
- Persian language
- Germany
- Gujarati language
- Neologism
- Indus River
- Indian independence movement
- South Africa
- Bhakti
- Bhakti movement
- Springer Publishing
- Assam
- Music
- American English
- Columbia University Press
- Mandarin Chinese
- Bengali language
- The Times of India
- Linguistics
- Uttar Pradesh
- Pakistan
- University of Wisconsin–Madison
- Portuguese language
- Mughal Empire
- Prakrit
Place in the tradition
Part of Bertrand Russell.