Sunday, 20 May 2012
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NameStandard Hindi
Nativename ''Mānak Hindī''
ImagecaptionThe word "Hindi" in Devanagari script
FamilycolorIndo-European
StatesIndia, Mauritius and significant communities in USA, UK, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Australia, Myanmar, Canada, Nepal, Afghanistan, South Africa, Uganda, New Zealand
Speakers180 million native in 1991
Fam2Indo-Iranian
Fam3Indo-Aryan
Fam4Central zone
Fam5Western Hindi
Fam6Khariboli
Fam7Hindustani
ScriptDevanagari
Nation
AgencyCentral Hindi Directorate (India)
Iso1hi
Iso2hin
Linglisthin-hin
Lingua59-AAF-q (with Urdu,including 58 varieties: 59-AAF-qaa to 59-AAF-qil)
NoticeIndic}}
Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi (Devanagari: ), High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardised and sanskritised register of the Hindustani language derived from the ''Khariboli'' dialect of Delhi (and the surrounding western Uttar Pradesh and southern Uttarakhand region). The primary official language of the Republic of India, it is one of the 22 official languages of India. The spoken Hindi dialects form an extensive dialect continuum of the Indic language family, bounded on the northwest and west by Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati and Marathi; on the southeast by Oriya; on the east by Maithili and Bengali; and on the north by Nepali.

Modern Hindi is mutually intelligible with the alternative register of the Hindustani language called Urdu. Mutual intelligibility decreases in literary and specialized contexts which rely on educated vocabulary. Because of religious nationalism since the partition of British India and continued communal tensions, native speakers of both Hindi and Urdu frequently assert them to be completely distinct languages, despite the fact that they generally cannot tell the colloquial languages apart. The combined population of Hindi and Urdu speakers is the fourth largest in the world. However, the number of native speakers of Standard Hindi is still ambiguous. According to the 2001 Indian census, 258 million people in India regarded their native language to be "Hindi". However, this includes large numbers of speakers of Hindi dialects besides Standard Hindi; as of 2009, the best figure ''Ethnologue'' could find for Khariboli Hindi was a dated 1991 figure of 180 million. Hindi is also enumerated as one of the twenty-two languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, which entitles it to representation on the Official Language Commission. The Constitution of India has stipulated the usage of Hindi and English to be the two languages of communication for the Central Government. Most of government documentation is prepared in three languages English, Hindi and the local state language.

It was envisioned that Hindi would become the sole working language of the central government by 1965 (per directives in Article 344 (2) and Article 351), with state governments being free to function in languages of their own choice. However, widespread resistance movements to the imposition of Hindi on non-native speakers, of especially the people living in south India (such as the Anti-Hindi agitations of Tamil Nadu) led to the passage of the Official Languages Act (1963), which provided for the continued use of English, indefinitely, for all official purposes. Therefore, English is still used in official documents, in courts, etc. However, the constitutional directive to the central government to champion the spread of Hindi was retained and has strongly influenced the policies of the Union government.

At the state level, Hindi is the official language of the following states in India: Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi and Himachal Pradesh. Each of these states may also designate a "co-official language"; in Uttar Pradesh for instance, depending on the political formation in power, sometimes this language is Urdu. Similarly, Hindi is accorded the status of co-official language in several states.

History

The dialect upon which Standard Hindi is based is ''khariboli'', the vernacular of the Delhi and Uttar Pradesh region. This dialect acquired linguistic prestige in the Mughal Empire (17th century) and became known as ''Urdu'', "the language of the court." After independence, the Government of India set about standardising Hindi as a separate language from Urdu, instituting the following conventions:
  • standardisation of grammar: In 1954, the Government of India set up a committee to prepare a grammar of Hindi; The committee's report was released in 1958 as "A Basic Grammar of Modern Hindi"
  • standardisation of the orthography, using the Devanagari script, by the Central Hindi Directorate of the Ministry of Education and Culture to bring about uniformity in writing, to improve the shape of some Devanagari characters, and introducing diacritics to express sounds from other languages.
  • standardisation of vocabulary, replacing most of the more learned Persian loan words with new coinages from Sanskrit. (See next.)
  • Alphabet and vocabulary

    Standard Hindi derives much of its formal and technical vocabulary from Sanskrit. Standard or ''shuddh'' ("pure") Hindi is used only in public addresses and radio or TV news, while the everyday spoken language in most areas is one of several varieties of Hindustani, whose vocabulary contains many words drawn from Persian and Arabic. In addition, spoken Hindi includes words from English and other languages as well. Actual Hindi (Devanagari) is spoken in the state of UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, MP, Chattisgarh, Jharkhand etc. Other states like Punjab, WestBengal, Orissa speak/use Hindi beside of their regional/state language. All over North, Central, East & West Indians use Hindi vastly. However, the literary registers differ substantially in borrowed vocabulary; in highly formal situations, the languages are barely intelligible to speakers of the other. Hindi has looked to Sanskrit for borrowings from at least the 19th century, and Urdu has looked to Persian and Arabic for borrowings from the eighteenth century. On another dimension, Hindi is associated with the Hindu community and Urdu with the Muslim community though this is much more a twentieth century phenomenon when the political impetus to actively distinguish Hindi from Urdu gathered pace amongst the educated Hindus driving this change. Prior to this it was the norm for both educated Hindu and Muslim Indians to be fluent in Urdu.

    There are five principal categories of words in Standard Hindi: ''Tatsam'' (तत्सम् / ''same as that'') words: These are words which are spelled the same in Hindi as in Sanskrit (except for the absence of final case inflections). They include words inherited from Sanskrit via Prakrit which have survived without modification (e.g. Hindustani ''nām''/Sanskrit ''nāma'', "name"), as well as forms borrowed directly from Sanskrit in more modern times (e.g. ''prārthanā'', "prayer"). Pronunciation, however, conforms to Hindi norms and may differ from that of classical Sanskrit. Among nouns, the ''tatsam'' word could be the Sanskrit uninflected word-stem, or it could be the nominative singular form in the Sanskrit nominal declension. ''Ardhātatsam'' (अर्धातात्सम्) words: These are words that were borrowed from Sanskrit in the middle Indo-Aryan or early New Indo-Aryan stages. Such words typically have undergone sound changes subsequent to being borrowed. ''Tadbhav'' (तद्भव / ''born of that'') words: These are words which are spelled differently from Sanskrit but are derivable from a Sanskrit prototype by phonological rules (e.g. Sanskrit ''karma'', "deed" becomes Pali ''kamma'', and eventually Hindi ''kām'', "work").

  • ''Deshaj'' (देशज) words: These are words that were not borrowings but do not derive from attested Indo-Aryan words either. Belonging to this category are onomatopoetic words.
  • ''Videshī'' (विदेशी) words: these include all words borrowed from sources other than Indo-Aryan. The most frequent sources of borrowing in this category have been Persian, Arabic, Portuguese and English.
  • Similarly, Urdu treats its own vocabulary, borrowed directly from Persian and Arabic, as a separate category for morphological purposes.

    Hindi from which most of the Persian, Arabic and English words have been ousted and replaced by ''tatsam'' words is called ''Shuddha Hindi'' (pure Hindi). Chiefly, the proponents of ''Hindutva'' ideology ("Hindu-ness") are vociferous supporters of ''Shuddha Hindi''.

    Excessive use of ''tatsam'' words sometimes creates problems for most native speakers. Strictly speaking, the ''tatsam'' words are words of Sanskrit and not of Hindi—thus they have complicated consonantal clusters which are not linguistically valid in Hindi. The educated middle class population of India can pronounce these words with ease, but people of rural backgrounds have much difficulty in pronouncing them. Similarly, vocabulary borrowed from Persian and Arabic also brings in its own consonantal clusters and "foreign" sounds, which may again cause difficulty in speaking them.

    Literature

    Hindi literature, is broadly divided into four prominent forms or styles, being ''Bhakti'' (devotional – Kabir, Raskhan); ''Shringar'' (beauty – Keshav, Bihari); ''Veer-Gatha'' (extolling brave warriors); and ''Adhunik'' (modern).

    Medieval Hindi literature is marked by the influence of Bhakti movement and the composition of long, epic poems. It was not written in the current dialect but in other Hindi languages, particularly in Avadhi and Braj Bhasha, but later also in Khariboli. During the British Raj, Hindustani became the prestige dialect. Hindustani with heavily Sanskritized vocabulary or ''Sahityik'' Hindi (Literary Hindi) was popularized by the writings of Swami Dayananda Saraswati, Bhartendu Harishchandra and others. The rising numbers of newspapers and magazines made Hindustani popular among the educated people. Chandrakanta, written by Devaki Nandan Khatri, is considered the first authentic work of prose in modern Hindi. The person who brought realism in the Hindi prose literature was Munshi Premchand, who is considered as the most revered figure in the world of Hindi fiction and progressive movement......

    The ''Dwivedi Yug'' ("Age of Dwivedi") in Hindi literature lasted from 1900 to 1918. It is named after Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, who played a major role in establishing the Modern Hindi language in poetry and broadening the acceptable subjects of Hindi poetry from the traditional ones of religion and romantic love.

    In the 20th century, Hindi literature saw a romantic upsurge. This is known as ''Chhayavaad'' (''shadowism'') and the literary figures belonging to this school are known as ''Chhayavaadi''. Jaishankar Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi 'Nirala', Mahadevi Varma and Sumitranandan Pant, are the four major ''Chhayavaadi'' poets.

    ''Uttar Adhunik'' is the post-modernist period of Hindi literature, marked by a questioning of early trends that copied the West as well as the excessive ornamentation of the Chhayavaadi movement, and by a return to simple language and natural themes.

    Sample text

    The following is a sample text in High Hindi, of the Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (by the United Nations): : 1 —

    Transliteration (IAST): :

    Transcription (IPA): :.

    Gloss (word-to-word): :Article 1 — ''All'' human-beings to dignity and rights' matter in from-birth freedom and equality acquired is. Them to reason and conscience's endowment acquired is and always them to brotherhood's spirit with behaviour to do should.

    Translation (grammatical): :Article 1 — All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

    Sanskritization

    Under the Indian government's encouragement, the officially sponsored version of the ''Khari-boli'' dialect has undergone a sea-change after it was declared the language of central government functioning in 1950. A major change has been the Sanskritisation of Hindi (introduction of Sanskrit vocabulary in Khariboli). Three factors motivated this conscious bid to sanskritize Hindi, being:
  • The independence movement inculcated a nationalistic pride in India's ancient culture, including its ancient classical language Sanskrit;
  • Independence was accompanied by partition along religious lines, with Muslim-majority areas seceding to form Pakistan, and a partial rejection of Persian and Arabic influence in the Hindu-majority areas; Saadat Hasan Manto, the Pakistani Urdu writer opposed to Hindi-Urdu divide.
  • The people of south and east India were averse to the dominance of the language and culture of north India in the affairs of the country. The Hindu populations of these regions did not identify with Hindi itself or with the Mughal (Persian, Turkic) cultural influences that had shaped Hindi, but they were more receptive to Sanskrit. Sanskritization was thus viewed as a means to make Hindi more palatable in practice.
  • In its non-Sanskritized form, the Khariboli-based dialect is the ''normal'' and principal dialect used in the Hindi cinema. It is almost exclusively used in contemporary Hindi television serials, songs, education, and of course, in normal daily speech in almost all the urban regions of north India, wherever Hindi is also the state language. The rural dialect varies from region to region.

    See also

  • Hindi-Urdu (covers phonology, grammar, and orthography)
  • Hindi literature
  • History of Hindustani
  • Anti-Hindi agitations of Tamil Nadu
  • Hinglish
  • Languages of India and Languages with official status in India
  • List of languages by number of native speakers in India
  • The list of Hindi words and list of words of Hindi origin at Wiktionary, the free dictionary
  • References

    Notes

    Bibliography

  • Bhatia, Tej K. ''Colloquial Hindi: The Complete Course for Beginners''. London, UK & New York, NY: Routledge, 1996. ISBN 0-415-11087-4 (Book), 0415110882 (Cassettes), 0415110890 (Book & Cassette Course)
  • .
  • Grierson, G. A. ''Linguistic Survey of India'' Vol I-XI, Calcutta, 1928, ISBN 81-85395-27-6
  • McGregor, R. S. (1977), ''Outline of Hindi Grammar'', 2nd Ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford-Delhi, ISBN 0-19-870008-3 (3rd ed.)
  • . . . . .
  • Taj, Afroz (2002) ''A door into Hindi''. Retrieved November 8, 2005.
  • Tiwari, Bholanath ([1966] 2004) ''हिन्दी भाषा (Hindī Bhāshā)'', Kitāb Mahal, Allahabad, ISBN 81-225-0017-X.
  • Dictionaries

    .

    Further reading

  • Bhatia, Tej K ''A History of the Hindi Grammatical Tradition''. Leiden, Netherlands & New York, NY : E.J. Brill, 1987. ISBN 90-04-07924-6
  • External links

  • The Union: Official Language
  • Official Unicode Chart for Devanagari (PDF)
  • English to Hindi Transliteration Editor developed by C-DAC Mumbai
  • USA Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Hindi basic course
  • ఘబబభయ

    * Category:Hindustani Category:Indo-Aryan languages Category:Languages of India Hindi

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    This text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.



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