ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 26: Hindi Hindi is the lingua franca of Northern India. It
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 26: Hindi Hindi is the lingua franca of Northern India. It is an Indo-Aryan language and mutually intelligible with Urdu. When spoken of together (Hindi, Urdu, and other related dialects) the language is called Hindustani. Hindi distinguishes itself primarily by using more words of Sanskrit origin than Urdu, and is written in Devanagari script instead of Arabic. Hindi is a SOV language, meaning its basic word order is Subject - Object - Verb. It uses postpositions instead of prepositions, meaning they come after the word instead of before it. Like Sindhi, Hindi has a four way distinction amongst it’s stop consonants; they can all be voiced or voiceless and aspirated or unaspirated. Hindi contains a sound that linguists call a “labial approximant”, written /ʋ/ in the international phonetic alphabet. To English ears this sounds kind of like a “v” and a “w”, and as such you’ll often see Hindi words written in English vary in their preference, and those familiar with Indian accents may notice this as well. The language is written using Devanagari, which is an abugida, meaning that the glyphs representing consonants modify their form to tell you what vowel follows, making every written letter an entire syllable. Devanagari is the widest used of the Brahmic family of writing systems which are used throughout the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. -- source link