ABSTRACT
A New Indo-Aryan language, Hindi has been the official language of India (along with English) since 1947. In terms of numbers it is by far the most important of the New Indo-Aryan languages, and may be ranked third in the world, with a conservative estimate of well over 330 million native speakers, centred in the northern states of Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, and many tens of millions more able to use it as a second language, predominantly in India. The 2001 Census of India puts the number of native speakers alone at over 420 million. Outside India there are considerable Hindi-speaking communities in many parts of the world.
