HINDI
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ABOUT THE HINDI LANGUAGE
Hindi (and Urdu) has descended from Hindustani, the colloquial form of speech that was spoken in the area in and around Delhi in North India roughly in the ninth and tenth centuries. This language was given the Persian name Hindvi/Hindi - i.e. the language of Hind, the land of the Indus River - by the Persian-speaking Turks who overran Punjab and the Gangetic plains in the early eleventh century and established what is known as the Delhi Sultanate. Hindvi was constructed largely from Sanskrit loan words that had been 'softened' for 'bol-chal' (common speech). It also absorbed Persian, and through Persian, Arabic loan words, and developed as a mixed or broken language of communication between the newly arrived immigrants and the resident native population of North India. It travelled south and west as the Sultanate expanded beyond the Gangetic plains. It developed into a national language during the colonial period when the British began to cultivate it as a standard among government officials. From the eighteenth century Hindvi began to flower as a literary language. In the course of another century it split into Hindi and Urdu, the former representing a Sanskrit bias and the latter a Persian one. Today, Hindi is written in the Devanagari script while Urdu is written in the Perso-Arabic script.
Countries/Areas where Hindi is spoken
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