Hindi is an Indian language spoken in most states in northern and central India. It's an Indo-European language, a prakrit. It became the official language of India on January 26, 1965. Hindi is the third most spoken language in the world only after Chinese and English. About 600 million people speak, read and write Hindi in India and abroad. In several countries like Fiji, Mauritius, Guana, Suriname and Nepal, the majority of the population speaks Hindi.
Linguists think of Hindi and Urdu as the same language, the difference being that Hindi is written in Devanagari and draws vocabulary from Sanskrit, while Urdu is written in Arabic script and draws on Persian and Arabic.
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