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Hindi
Hindi is the most widely spoken language in the Republic of India, centered principally in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh in the north-central part of the country. Its 225 million speakers rank it as one of the leading languages of the world but it is, nevertheless, understood by only 1/3 of India's population. When independence was achieved in 1947, Hindi was chosen as India's national language, but its failure to win acceptance among speakers of other languages has forced it to share official status with English.
Speakers of Hindi are also to be found in many scattered parts of the world. In the newly independent country of Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, and Fiji, in the Pacific, it is spoken by about a third of the population. There are also sizeable bodies of speakers in Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam. Like most of the languages in Northern India, Hindi is descended from Sanskrit. Hindi and Urdu, the official language of Pakistan, are virtually the same language, though the former is written in Sanskrit characters and the latter in Arabic characters. Pure Hindi derives most of its vocabulary from Sanskrit, while Urdu contains many words from Persian and Arabic. The basis of both languages is actually Hindustani, the colloquial form of speech that served as the lingua franca of much of India for 4 centuries.
Hindi was a variety of Hindustani spoken in the area of New Delhi. Its development into a national language had its beginnings in the colonial period, when the British began to cultivate it as a standard among government officials. Later it was used for literary purposes and has since become the vehicle for some excellent prose and poetry. Sanskrit is the ancient literary and classic language of India, the sacred language of the Hindu religion. Much like Latin was for the Romance languages, it eventually gave rise to the modern Indian languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Gujarati, as well as Nepali spoken in Nepal and Sinhalese spoken in Sri Lanka. It is an Indo-European language, which was not known until the 18th century when scientists noticed the striking similarity to Latin and Greek. This caused the spark that realized the interrelationship of all Indo-European languages, which in turn laid the foundation of comparative linguistics. It is written in an Alphabet known as Devanagari. The source of this, and a majority of the Indian scripts were Brahmi and Asoka, which was the origin of Aramaic also. The alphabet, which is written left to right, consists of 48 characters of which 34 are consonants and 14 are vowels or diphthongs. It is considered one of the most perfect systems of writing ever devised.