Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi ,High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardised register of Hindustani identified with Hindus. It is one of the 22 official languages of India and is used as the primary official laguage of the Republic of India. Standard Hindi is a sansritised register derived from the khariboli dialect. By contrast, the spoken Hindi dialects form an extensive dialect continuum of the Indic language family, bounded on the northwest and west by Punjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati and Marahthi; on the southeast by Oriya; on the east by Maithili and Bengali; and on the north by Nepali.
The number of speakers of Standard Hindi is ambiguous. According to the 2001 Indian census, 258 million people in India regarded their native language to be "Hindi". However, this includes large numbers of speakers of Hindi dialects besides Standard Hindi; as of 2009, the best figure Ethnologue could find for Khariboli Hindi was a dated 1991 figure of 180 million.
The Constitution of India, adopted in 1956, declares Hindi in the Devanagari script as the official language of the Union .Hindi is also enumerated as one of the twenty-two languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, which entitles it to representation on the Official Language Commission. The Constitution of India has stipulated the usage of Hindi and English to be the two languages of communication for the Central Government.
It was envisioned that Hindi would become the sole working language of the central government by 1965 with state governments being free to function in languages of their own choice. However, widespread resistance movements to the imposition of Hindi on non-native speakers, of especially the people living in south India (such as the Anti-Hindi agitations of Tamil Nadu) led to the passage of the Official Languages Act (1963), which provided for the continued use of English, indefinitely, for all official purposes. Therefore, English is still used in official documents, in courts, etc. However, the constitutional directive to the central government to champion the spread of Hindi was retained and has strongly influenced the policies of the Union government.
At the state level, Hindi is the official language of the following states in India: Arunachal Pradesh, Bihar,Jharkhand U ttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Delhi. Each of these states may also designate a "co-official language"; in Uttar Pradesh for instance, depending on the political formation in power, sometimes this language is Urdu. Similarly, Hindi is accorded the status of co-official language in several states.
