Hindi: a short portrait

Where it comes from

Hindi belongs to the Indo-Aryan languages, the branch of the Indo-European family that also gave India Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi and Gujarati. That makes it a distant cousin of English, and a few very old words still show it: नामand nameमाँand motherदाँतand dentalनयाand new

Its line runs from Sanskrit, the classical language of ancient India, through the spoken Prakrit languages of the centuries that followed, to the regional languages of the north in the Middle Ages. Modern standard Hindi grew out of one of them, the speech of the region around Delhi, called खड़ी बोली. Two other varieties had a great literature long before it: ब्रज, the language of devotional poetry about Krishna, and अवधी, in which Tulsidas retold the Ramayana in the sixteenth century.

Hindi and Urdu

For centuries the speech of the Delhi region was one language with many names — Hindustani, Hindavi, Rekhta. Under the Mughal emperors it absorbed a great many words from Persian, the language of the court, and through Persian from Arabic and Turkish. That everyday language, shared by Hindus and Muslims, is still the core of both Hindi and Urdu.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the two were pulled apart. Urdu, written in a Perso-Arabic script, turned to Persian and Arabic for its formal vocabulary; Hindi, written in Devanagari, turned to Sanskrit. Today a conversation in the market can be called either, and speakers of the two understand each other easily — less so as the subject becomes formal, and not at all on paper, where the scripts differ. Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and one of the languages of India.

Where it is spoken today

Hindi is the main language of a broad belt of northern and central India, from Rajasthan to Bihar and from the Himalayan foothills to Madhya Pradesh. Under the Constitution of India it is the official language of the Union, written in Devanagari, with English beside it, and several states use it as their own official language. 14 September, the day in 1949 on which that decision was taken, is celebrated as Hindi Day.

Within that belt the regional languages and dialects are clearly audible, and many people grow up speaking one at home and standard Hindi at school. Outside it, in the south and the east, Hindi is a second or third language, learnt at school and through films. Indian workers who went to Fiji, Mauritius, Suriname and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century took their Hindi with them, and in several of those places varieties of it are spoken to this day.

Devanagari

Devanagari is used for Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and Sanskrit, among others. It descends from the Brahmi script of ancient India, which also gave rise to the scripts of Bengali, Tamil, Thai and Tibetan. Its letters are arranged not as in the Latin alphabet but by how the sounds are made: the vowels first, then the consonants row by row from the back of the mouth to the lips.

Every consonant carries a short a — क is ka — and other vowels are added as signs above, below, before or after it: कि, की, कु, के. Two consonants with no vowel between them join into one cluster. The letters hang from a line drawn along the top, the शिरोरेखा, and a word is the stretch of that line between two spaces. Sentences end with an upright stroke, the danda: ।

Words it gave and words it took

English borrowed from Hindi during the colonial period, often without knowing where the word came from: shampoo from चाँपो, “press!”, said during a head massage; jungle from जंगल; loot from लूट; thug from ठग; bungalow from a word for a house in the Bengali style; and pyjamas, which Hindi had itself taken from Persian.

Hindi has borrowed far more than it has lent. Beside the old Persian layer — दुकान, shop; ज़रूर, certainly; शायद, perhaps — modern Hindi is full of English: स्कूल, स्टेशन, फ़ोन, टिकट. Mixing whole English phrases into Hindi sentences is so common in cities that it has a name, Hinglish, and some loanwords have taken on meanings of their own on the way: a पिक्चर is a film.

What surprises an English speaker

The verb comes at the end, and the small words for in, on and from come after the noun: मैं दिल्ली में रहता हूँ, I live in Delhi, is literally “I Delhi in live am”. Every noun is masculine or feminine, and the adjective, the possessive and the verb change with it — so a man says मैं थका हूँ and a woman मैं थकी हूँ for “I am tired”.

The past tense of a verb with an object works differently from anything in English: the subject takes ने, and the verb agrees with the object. मैंने चाय पी, I drank tea, has a feminine verb because tea is feminine, whoever drank it. Respect is built in as well: there are three words for “you”, each with its own verb forms, and older people are addressed with आप and the name followed by जी.

The sounds hold two surprises. Hindi has two t’s and two d’s, one made on the teeth and one with the tongue curled back, and it keeps a puff of breath after a consonant as part of the sound, so कान, ear, and खान, mine, are different words. And the short a that the script writes into every consonant often falls silent: कमरा, room, is said kamrā.