After English and Mandarin, Hindi is the third most widely-spoken language in the world. It is a subset of the Indo-European family, and I can sometimes find some similarities between Serbian and Hindi. The writing system of Hindi is derived from Sanskrit, one of the oldest languages in the world.
Hindi language came from Hindustani. During the ninth and tenth centuries, Hindustani was the colloquial language of in Northern India (area around New Delhi). The language was named Hindi by the Persian Turks who ruled in Punjab and Gangetic plains areas and created Delhi Sultanate within it. Hindi absorbed Persian (and also Arab words) and therefore, the language was a mean of communication between the migrants and local population in the eleventh century. As the Delhi Sultanate was expending, so was the language.
Upon the British arrival to India, Hindi became a national language, as the British started using it amongst the government officials. In the eighteenth century it started to expand as a literary language. Hindi is written in Devangari script.
After the independence of India in 1947, government worked on standardization of Hindi language and in 1965 it became the official language of India. Different colonial powers influenced Hindi language. Thus, languages that enriched Hindi are: English, Portuguese, Farsi, Arabic, and Turkish.
Even though Hindi is a standardized language, there are many dialects of Hindi. While I was in India I studied the standardized Hindi, and often was not able to communicate with people living in villages who also spoke Hindi.
Sources:
http://www.jazykhindi.com/hindi/history.asp
http://www.hindisociety.com/ArticleHindiHistory.htm
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