||Hindi Ek Rajya ki Nahi, Rashtra ki Bhasha ||

Hindi-Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language and the lingua franca of North India and Pakistan. It is also known as Hindustani  literally meaning "of Hindustan"), and historically, as Hindavi or Rekhta. It derives primarily from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi, and incorporates a large amount of vocabulary from Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit and Turkic.It is a pluricentric language, with two official forms, Standard Hindi and Standard Urdu, which are standardized registers of it. The colloquial languages are all but indistinguishable, and even the official standards are nearly identical in grammar, though they differ in literary conventions and in academic and technical vocabulary, with Urdu retaining stronger Persian, Central Asian and Arabic influences, and Hindi relying more heavily on Sanskrit. Before the Partition of British India, the terms Hindustani, Urdu, and Hindi were synonymous; all covered what would be called Urdu and Hindi today. The term Hindustani is still used for the colloquial language and lingua franca of India and Pakistan, for example for the language of Bollywood films, as well as for several quite different varieties of Hindi spoken outside of the Subcontinent, such as Fijian Hindustani and the Caribbean Hindustani of Suriname and Trinidad.

Hindi, in the broad sense, consists of a variety of dialects [spoken  across a geographical area] within the Indo-Aryan language family in the northern plains of India, bounded on the northwest and west by Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati and Marathi; on the east by Maithili and Bengali; and on the north by Nepali.

This wide definition results in a clear majority of Indians being speakers of Hindi. As defined in the 1991 census, Hindi covers a number of Central, East-Central, Eastern, and Northern Zone languages, including the Bihari languages excepting Maithili, the Rajasthani languages, and the Pahari languages excepting Dogri and Nepali. Linguistically, it is equally possible to classify these as separate languages rather than dialects.

Standard Hindi, the official language of India, is based on the Khariboli dialect of the Delhi region and differs from Urdu in that it is usually written in the indigenous Devnagri script of India and exhibits less Persian influence than Urdu. It has a literature of 500 years, with prose, poetry, religion & philosophy, under the Bahmani Kings and later on Khutab Shahi Adil Shahi etc. It is a living language, still prevalent all over the Deccan Plateau. Note that the term "Hindustani" has generally fallen out of common usage in modern India, except to refer to a style of Indian classical music prevalent in northern India. The term used to refer to the language is "Hindi", regardless of the mix of Persian or Sanskrit words used by the speaker. One could conceive of a wide spectrum of dialects, with the highly Persianized Urdu at one end of the spectrum and a heavily Sanskrit-based dialect, spoken in the region around Varanasi, at the other end of the spectrum. In common usage in India, the term "Hindi" includes all these dialects except those at the Urdu end of the spectrum. Thus, the different meanings of the word "Hindi" include, among others:

1. standardized Hindi as taught in schools throughout India,
2. formal or official Hindi advocated by Purushottam Das Tandon and as instituted by the post-independence Indian government, heavily influenced by Sanskrit,
3. the vernacular dialects of Hindustani/Hindi-Urdu as spoken throughout India,
4. the neutralized form of the language used in popular television and films, or
5. the more formal neutralized form of the language used in broadcast and print news reports.