Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language with about 487 million speakers. It is one of the official languages of India and is used as the language of administration, the media, education and literature in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. Elsewhere in India, Hindi is used, along side English, as a second language.

Hindi is also spoken in Bangladesh, Belize, Botswana, Canada, Germany, Guyana, Kenya, Nepal, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Suriname, Trinidad, Uganda, UAE, UK, USA, Yemen, Zambia. Hindi is closely related to Urdu, the main language of Pakistan, which is written with the Arabic script.

Hindi first started to be used in writing during the 4th century AD. It was originally written with the Brahmi script but since the 11th century AD it has been written with the Devanagari alphabet. The first printed book in Hindi was John Gilchrist's Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language which was published in 1796.

Hindi is an Indo-European language spoken mainly in northern and central India, is the official language of the Union along with English.[2][3] It is part of a language continuum of the Indic family, bounded on the northwest and west by Punjabi, Sindhi, and Gujarati; on the south by Marathi and Konkani; on the southeast by Oriya; on the east by Bengali; and on the north by Nepali.

More narrowly, Hindi also refers to a standardized register of Hindustani termed khariboli, that emerged as the standard dialect.