Interesting facts about the language

Around 200 million people speak Hindi as their native language. However, because Hindi is not only the official language but also the most important lingua franca in India alongside English, it is spoken by significantly more people as a second language: More than half a billion Indians speak Hindi. This makes it the fourth most widely spoken language in the world (after Mandarin, English, and Spanish).

Hindi is primarily spoken in central and northern India, for example, in the Delhi region and in the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Madhya Pradesh. Hindi is the most widely spoken language of the Indo-Aryan language family. Hindi has also been written since the 12th century. To write Hindi, one must use the Devanagari alphabet. Devanagari is also used as a script for other languages of the Indian subcontinent, such as Marathi, Nepali, and Sanskrit.

Devanagari is a so-called syllabary in which individual letters are not represented as characters, but rather whole syllables. This means that every consonant in this alphabet contains a vowel. Urdu is the "twin language" of Hindi. When a Hindi and an Urdu speaker converse in everyday life, they can understand each other without much difficulty. Urdu is also spoken in India (where it is the native language of around 50 million people) and in neighboring Pakistan. The main difference between the two languages lies in the borrowings they have taken from other languages: many Hindi words are derived from Sanskrit. Urdu, on the other hand, uses a large number of Persian and Arabic words. And so the two languages use completely different writing systems: while Hindi is written using Devanagari, Urdu uses Arabic script.