HINDI LANGUAGE

official language of the Republic of India, a central Indo-Aryan language claimed as a mother tongue by more than 150,000,000 speakers. Literary Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, shows a strong influence of Sanskrit as a source for borrowings; it is based on the Khari Boli dialect, to the north and east of Delhi. Also commonly treated as dialects of Hindi are Braj Bhasa, which was an important literary medium from the 15th to the 17th century; Avadhi, also a literary medium; and Bagheli, Chattisgarhi, Bundeli, and Kanauji. Hindi has a much simpler inflectional system than does Sanskrit, although the literary language uses a great number of Sanskrit forms. Nouns and pronouns have lost the full declension in eight cases of Sanskrit and instead make use of postpositions-small words attached to the end of nouns and functioning much like English prepositions. There are only two genders, masculine and feminine, whereas Gujarati and Marathi retain three. Verbs also are much reduced in inflectional complexity, with only the present and future indicative forms fully conjugated; other constructions are based on participial forms.