| Group | Indic (with Sanskrit, Pali etc.), New Indic (with Marathi, Punjabi etc.) |
| Geography & History | The number of Hindi speakers exceeds 200 million, making it he fourth major language in the world. Hindi is the official language of India and is natively spoken in the states of Uttar-Pradesh, Madhya-Pradesh, Haryana, Bihar, Pajasthan, Himachal-Pradesh and in Delhi itself. Sometimes the name of Hindi is used when identifying a group of neighbouring Indo-Aryan languages, like Bihari, Rajasthani and West Pahari. Within the language, there are two major dialectal groups. |
| Phonetics | Long and short vowels are distinguished, there are also nasal vowels. The consonants have all the 5 series as in other Indic tongues, there is an opposition between voiced and unvoiced, aspirated and non-aspirarted. |
| Morphology | Hindi lies somewhere in the middle as a compromise between the flective western tongues of the Indo-Aryan area and the agglutinative eastern ones. Nouns have preserved much less flective forms than they occur today in Marathi, however, the agglutination did not reach its high Bengali-like level. Still, the analytical nominal forms are numerous shaped by postpositions. The verb forms its complex constructions with auxiliary verbs. |
| Lexicon | In lexicon and syntax, the great influence of Sanskrit is doubtless, as Sanskrit still remains a literature language for educated classes. |
| Writing | Devanagari Script |
| Close Contacts | Urdu is the closest relative of Hindi, as they both originate from the Hindustani language which was spoken and written in British India in the 19th century. Other central Indic tongues (Bihari, Rajasthani, West Pahari) are also close to Hindi. |
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