Forum Pakistan

Hindi (also Hindavi/Hindustani)
Hindi belongs to the *Indo-Aryan group of languages, a subset of the Indo-European family. It has been influenced and enriched by Persian, Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Portuguese, and English. Hindi is broadly identical with *Urdu, the official language of Pakistan, and is closely related to Bengali, *Punjabi and *Gujarati. The script, Devanagari, is extremely logical and therefore straightforward and easy to learn. The general appearance of the Devanagari script is that of letters 'hanging from a line'. This 'line', also found in many other South Asian scripts, is actually a part of most of the letters and is drawn as the writing proceeds. The script has no capital letters.
Hindi is the official language of the Republic of India, and the common second language of Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana and Surinam.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: G.H. Fairbanks, B.G. Misra, 'Spoken and Written Hindi' 1966; A. Rai, 'A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi-Hindavi', 1985.