Hindi Language Guide

Official language in
India
Script
Devanagari
Speakers
528M (2011)

Where it's spoken

India's constitution names Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, as the official language of the Union government, while also providing that English continues to be used for the Union's official purposes, an arrangement Parliament may extend by law. A separate constitutional provision lets each Indian state adopt its own official language or languages, so Hindi is not automatically the official language of every state a traveler passes through. According to India's most recent national census, Hindi is the mother tongue of more than 43% of the country's population, the highest share of any single language it counted.

Sources

Script & pronunciation

This app's Hindi cards are written in Devanagari, the same script the Unicode Standard says was used for classical Sanskrit and "its modern historical derivative, Hindi," and the script India's constitution names for Hindi. Devanagari is an abugida, a script in which each consonant letter by itself stands for a consonant plus an inherent vowel, and a different vowel is instead shown by attaching a vowel sign, or mātrā, to the consonant. When a syllable has no vowel of its own, a virama mark — called हल् (hal) or halant in Hindi — suppresses a consonant's inherent vowel so that it can combine into a conjunct with the following consonant; this app's card क्या ("what") is built this way, joining क and य with the inherent vowel of क suppressed. Everyday Hindi speech is close to Urdu, but the two are conventionally written in different scripts: Urdu is, in the Unicode Standard's words, "often written with the ornate Nastaliq" style of the Perso-Arabic script rather than Devanagari. This app's Latin-script romanizations of its Devanagari text are not fully consistent: some cards spell long vowels by doubling the letter and skip diacritics, as in धन्यवाद → dhanyavaad ("thank you"), while others mark long vowels and nasal sounds with diacritics, as in आपके पास कौन से गेम उपलब्ध हैं? → Āpke pās kaun se gem uplabdh haiṃ? ("What games do you have available?").

Sources

Grammar essentials

Hindi's most typical word order is subject–object–verb, as illustrated by this app's card हिंदी में "धन्यवाद" कैसे कहते हैं? ("How do you say \"thank you\" in Hindi?"), whose own note points out that Hindi follows SOV word order. In place of English-style prepositions, Hindi uses postpositions such as में ("in"), पर ("on"), तक ("up to"), and से ("by/with/from"), which follow the word they govern instead of preceding it; this app's card शिखर तक कितनी दूर और है? ("How much further to the summit?") places तक directly after the noun it governs, शिखर ("summit"). Negation places नहीं immediately before the verb it negates, as in this app's card मेरे कपड़े साफ़ नहीं हुए — क्या आप उन्हें फिर से धो सकते हैं? ("My laundry is not clean — can you rewash it?"), where नहीं comes right before हुए ("became/happened"). Hindi's present-tense verb also agrees with the gender of its subject: this app's card मैं थोड़ा-थोड़ा बोलता हूँ ("I speak a little") notes that a woman instead says बोलती हूँ, since the present tense agrees with the subject's gender.

Sources

Politeness & etiquette

Hindi's honorific system runs on a three-way progression of second-person pronouns: the intimate तू, the familiar तुम, and the formal आप, with तुम and आप both grammatically plural even when only one person is addressed. This app's cards default to the formal आप when speaking to someone you don't already know, as in आपका नाम क्या है? ("What is your name?") and क्या आप अंग्रेज़ी बोलते हैं? ("Do you speak English?"), whose own notes say to use आप with strangers and elders and to keep तुम and तू for people you know well. The same आप level of formality also shapes Hindi's imperative verb forms, which take a different ending depending on whether the command is addressed with तू, तुम, or आप; this app's cards सुनिए ("Excuse me") and माफ़ कीजिए ("Sorry") both end in the -िए ending that marks an आप-level command.

Sources

Browse all TravelPhrases languages