Hindi
Hindi, like Urdu, can be described as a literary variant of Hindustani, the lingua franca of the northern Indian subcontinent. Hindi has been the official language of India along with English since 1947. Today's standard Hindi is based on the vernacular of Delhi, called Khari boli, and is written in the Devanagari script. Grammatically, it differs little from Urdu, but it does differ in lexis.
Hindi literature has a history of almost a thousand years; however, most of the pre-modern works are written in literary languages related to today's standard Hindi but distinct from it, such as Braj and Avadhi, which are not readily available to the student of Hindi. Writing in present-day standard Hindi has been emerging primarily since the 19th century, and today Hindi is the medium of an extensive modern literature.
Regionally, Hindi is mainly anchored in the North Indian "Hindi Belt"; however, as a second or third language, it is understood far beyond.
Studying Hindi offers:
access to one of the major recent literary languages of South Asia for those interested in linguistics and literary studies;
the benefits of mastering the great lingua franca of the northern subcontinent;
material for the modern cultural, religious and political history of (North) India;
the linguistic requirements for independent information gathering from regional and national media (press, radio, internet, television);
access to the language of the so-called Bollywood films (a generally understandable colloquial language, which often contains numerous Anglicisms).
