The Emory College Language Center
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Introduction

Hindi belongs to the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. The official language of India, Hindi is the written or literary variant of Hindustani that is used by Hindus. It is written in the Devanagari alphabet employed for Sanskrit and has a vocabulary of Indic origin. Hindi is the most widely spoken of the Indian languages, yet still only spoken by about 30% of India. It was made the national language in 1947, when India gained independence from Great Britain. Some 300 million people speak Hindi as their primary language.