More than a thousand languages and dialects are spoken throughout India. The nation has no fewer than 16 official languages, including English, Tamil, Bengali, and Hindi.

Of these, Hindi is the main language, spoken by more than 180 million people. It's the second most spoken language in the world, after Chinese.

Hindi belongs to the Indo-European language family, which also includes the ancient languages Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek, plus most European languages—English, Russian, German, Spanish, French, and Italian. Farsi, the language of the Persians, is also an Indo-European tongue, as is Kurdish, spoken by Kurds, and the Pashtu language of the Pashtun people. Urdu, the official language of Pakistan, is a variation of Hindi.

The oldest Indo-European language still in use is Sanskrit. It is used today mainly in Hindu religious texts.

Hindi is written using an alphabet called Devanagari. Words are read from left to right, with spaces between words. There are no uppercase letters used in Hindi writing.

Many English words have a Hindi origin, such as "cheetah," "jungle," "pajamas," and "shampoo."