Hindi is an official language of India and is commonly written in the Devanagari script.
Standard Hindi belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family. Its modern standardized form developed from varieties associated with the Delhi region, especially the Khari Boli base. Devanagari writes Hindi from left to right and uses a horizontal headline connecting many letters in a word.
Hindi shares substantial vocabulary and grammatical features with Urdu. The two are often described as standardized registers of the broader Hindustani linguistic tradition, but Hindi generally draws more formal vocabulary from Sanskrit while Urdu uses more Persian and Arabic vocabulary and is normally written in a Perso-Arabic script.
India’s constitutional language arrangements are more complex than the phrase “national language” suggests. Hindi is an official language of the Union, English is also used for official purposes, and individual states recognize additional official languages.