Hindi

Hindi belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European language family.

• ISO 639-3: hin
• Glottocode: hind1269

Speakers

According to the 2011 Census of India, there are approximately 528 million speakers who returned Hindi as their mother tongue (representing roughly 43.6% of the Indian population), although this administrative figure includes a vast dialect continuum and several distinct related regional languages.

Distribution in India

Hindi is predominantly spoken in the "Hindi Belt" of northern, central, and parts of eastern and western India (either as the first or as a second language). The principal regions and states where it serves as an official language or primary medium of communication include: * Uttar Pradesh * Bihar * Madhya Pradesh * Rajasthan * Haryana * Himachal Pradesh * Chhattisgarh * Jharkhand * Uttarakhand * The National Capital Territory of Delhi

Major grammatical features

• Phonology: Hindi features a rich, symmetrical consonant inventory characterized by a four-way contrast in stops (voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, voiced unaspirated, and voiced aspirated) across five places of articulation, including a distinct retroflex series (/ʈ/, /ʈʰ/, /ɖ/, /ɖʱ/). Vowels contrast phonemically by length (short vs. long) and nasalization.
• Morphology: The language is moderately inflective. Nouns are inflected for two grammatical genders (masculine and feminine), two numbers (singular and plural), and three cases (direct, oblique, and vocative). Verbs are highly inflected for tense, aspect, mood, and person, often utilizing auxiliary constructions.
• Syntax: Hindi is characteristically a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) language. It employs postpositions rather than prepositions. Syntactically, it exhibits split-ergativity: in perfective aspects, the subject of a transitive verb is marked with the ergative postposition ne, and the verb agrees in gender and number with the direct object rather than the subject.

Further reading

• Learn more on the Wikipedia article on Hindi.
• Detailed linguistic classifications and references can be found via Glottolog and the ISO 639-3 Registry.