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Hindi language, official and most widely spoken language in India, with about 153,729,100 speakers; it belongs to the central group of the Indo-Aryan languages, Written in Devanagari script, the literary language shows strong Sanskrit influence. Hindi includes two major and very different dialectal divisions: Eastern and Western Hindi. Western Hindi is the source of literary Hindi and Urdu; it originated in the region between the Ganges and Jamuna rivers near Delhi. Its main dialects are Khari Boli, the standard dialect based on the speech of Delhi, and Bundeli, Braj Bhasa, and Kanauji. Braj Bhasa was an important literary language from the 15th through the 17th century. From the 19th century, Khari Boli began to develop as the more prominent literary form. Eastern Hindi, spoken in Oudh, Baghelkhand, and Chhattisgarh, India, has an important literature in the Awadhi (Avadhi) dialect, which includes the well-known translation of the Ramayaisa epic by Tulsids.
Hindi has a much simpler grammar than Sanskrit, although the literary language uses a great number of Sanskrit forms. Nouns and pronouns have lost the full declension in eight cases that they showed in Sanskrit and instead make use of postpositions—small words attached to the end of nouns and functioning much like English prepositions.
There are only two genders, masculine and feminine, whereas Gujarati and Marathi retain three. Verbs also are much reduced in complexity, with only the present and future indicative forms fully conjugated; other constructions are based on participial forms.
The writings of the western Braj Bhasa and Khari Boli and of the eastern Awadhi and Bundeli dialects of the Indian subcontinent and also the writings of parts of Rjasthan in the west and of Bihar in the east that, strictly speaking, are not Hindi at all. Hindi literature also conventionally includes those works of Muslim writers (such as Jayasi) in the Persian script in which the content is Hindu rather than Muslim in nature. It first began to appear in the 7th century AD and reached a consistency in the 10th. Almost all the earlier literature is in verse and in a dialect other than Khari Boli. The latter, on which modern standard Hindi and Urdu are based, was not widely used as a literary language until the end of the 17th century. Braj persisted as a medium for poetry until the late 19th century, although Khari Boli has now displaced it. Hence the anomaly that the language of modern Hindi literature is different from that of earlier periods.
