Global Profile of Hindi Language

The Hindi language consists of 11 vowels and 35 consonants and is written in a script called "Devanagari". Hindi is equipped with a rich consonant system, with about 38 distinct consonant units of sounds. However, the number of phonemes, as these units of sound cannot be accurately determined, owing to the large number of dialects that exist, which employ many derivative forms of the consonant repertoire. However, the traditional core of the consonant system is directly inherited from Sanskrit with additional seven sounds conjectured to have originated from Persian and Arabic.

Regions where spoken

With over 500 million speakers, Hindi is the second-most spoken language after Chinese. Hindi has undergone a considerable change before it was adopted as the "Rajyabhasha" (National language) of India. 

As per the theory of the Indo-Aryan linguistic classification system, Hindi resides in the Central Zone of languages. As per a 1991 census report, Hindi was proclaimed by over 77 % of the Indian population as the "one language across the nation". Hindi is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, due to the large population of India. According to the 1991 census of India (which encompasses all the dialects of Hindi, including those that might be considered separate languages by some linguists—e.g., Bhojpuri), Hindi is the mother tongue of about 337 million Indians, or about 40% of India's population that year. According to SIL International's Ethnologue,  about 180 million people in India regard standard (Khari Boli) Hindi as their mother tongue, and another 300 million use it as a second language. Outside India, Hindi speakers number around 8 million in Nepal, 890,000 in South Africa, 685,000 in Mauritius, 317,000 in the US. 233,000 in Yemen, 147,000 in Uganda, 30,000 in Germany, 20,000 in New Zealand and 5,000 in Singapore, while the UK, UAE, Canada and Australia  also have notable populations of Hindi speakers and bilingual or trilingual speakers who translate and interprete between English to Hindi or Hindi to English in combination with other Indian or foreign langugaes.