Hindi (हिन्दी) Devanagari Alphabet Photos

Come view some interesting images concerning the Hindu (Devanagari) Alphabet and Language.  I included not only political maps, but also population density, and religious maps. 

Even though a descendent of the Brahmi script, Devanagari has evolved into a highly cursive script. Many languages in India, such as Hindi and Sanskrit, use Devanagari and many more languages throughout India use local variants of this script.

Hindu scriptures are written in Devanagari, a fact illustrated by the etymology of the name. "Devanagari" is a compound word with two roots: deva means "deity", and nagari means "city". Together it implies a script that is both religious as well as urbane or sophisticated.

   

Hindi (हिन्दी)   - The following excerpt comes from Omniglot

Hindi is an Indo-Aryan language with about 487 million speakers. It is one of the official languages of India and is the main language used in the northern states of Rajasthan, Delhi, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand and Bihar, and is spoken in much of north and central India alongside other languages such as Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi or Bengali. In other parts of India, as well as in Nepal, Bangladesh and Pakistan, Hindi is understood. In Fiji people of Indian origin speak Hindi, and in some areas the Fijian people also speak it.

Hindi is closely related to Urdu, the main language of Pakistan, which is written with the Arabic script, and linguists consider Standard Hindi and Standard Urdu to be different formal registers both derived from the Khari Boli dialect, which is also known as Hindustani. Apart from the difference in writing systems, the other main difference between Hindi and Urdu is that Hindi contains more vocabulary from Sanskrit, while Urdu contains more vocabulary from Persian. At an informal spoken level there are few significant differences between Urdu and Hindi and they could be considered varieties a single language.

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 Devanāgarī alphabet. The first printed book in Hindi was John Gilchrist's Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language which was published in 1796.