ABSTRACT
Hindi, generally considered by language statisticians to be anywhere from the third to the fifth most widely spoken language in the world, is spoken natively by upwards of 300 million people. The language is, along with English, one of the two officially recognized national languages of India. The major concentration of speakers of the language is in the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi, although not insignificant numbers of speakers of the language can be found throughout all of India. Distinctive non-standard varieties of Hindi are found in large urban areas of India outside of the so- called ‘Hindi belt’, with those spoken in Mumbai, Hyderabad (V Sharma 1981), and Calcutta (Chatterji 1931, Jagannathan 1981) especially noteworthy. Various forms of Hindi are spoken as a second or subsequent language throughout South Asia and by many millions of people of north Indian extraction as part of a worldwide Indian diaspora. Several overseas forms of Hindi, particularly those spoken in Guyana, Suriname (where the language is known as Sarnami (Gambhir 1981, Damsteegt 1990), Trinidad, Fiji (Moag 1977, 1986), Mauritius, and South Africa either have some order of political recognition (e.g. Fiji, Mauritius, Suriname) or are spoken by significant populations (Barz and Siegel 1988). In recent years the spread of this diaspora also has resulted in the establishment of communities of Hindi speakers in Europe, the United States and Canada. Hindi, together with its sister language Urdu, is spoken as a second or subsequent language by tens of millions of people in South Asia. The language also serves as a lingua franca in emigrant Indian communities throughout the world.
