

Most English speakers find Hindi pronunciation rather challenging, as there are 11 separate vowels and 35 separate consonants, employing a large number of distinctions not found in English. Learning Devanagari is not quite as difficult as you might think at first glance, but mastering it takes a while and is beyond the scope of most travellers. Hindi is written in the Devanāgarī (देवनागरी) script, shared with Nepali, Marathi and a number of other Indian languages.

Hindustani is different than what is taught at the literary level and what is used by news programs and the government in India.Ī striking fact is that, depending on the source, Hindi is listed as the 5th most widely spoken language in the world. A mixture of Hindi and Urdu, called Hindustani (though this name is also applied to the Caribbean dialect of Hindi), is the form heard in most Bollywood films, that try to appeal to the widest audience possible. Hindi is descended from Sanskrit, sometimes called "the mother of all Indo-European languages," or "Latin of the East." Hindi developed from the proto-Hindi खड़ी बोली Khaṛī Bolī (lit.

Of the 22 official languages and over 1,000 dialects of India, Hindi along with English is promoted by the government and viewed by over half the population as a "link-language." Hindi हिन्दी is an Indo-European language spoken in India, and by minorities in Nepal, Fiji, United Arab Emirates, Trinidad, Suriname, South Africa, UK, USA and Australia.
