Hindi is part of the
Indo-Aryan dialect continuum that lies within the cultural Hindi Belt in the northern plains of India. This definition of Hindi is one of the ones used in the
Indian census, and results in more than forty per cent of
Indians being reported to be speakers of Hindi, though Hindi-area respondents vary as to whether they call their language Hindi or the actual name of their language. As defined in the 1991 census, Hindi has a broad and a narrow sense. The term "Hindi" is thus ambiguous. Before being identified as a separate language,
Maithili was identified by the census as a Hindi dialect. Many such languages still struggle for recognition. The broad sense covers a number of
Central,
East-Central,
Eastern, and
Northern Indo-Aryan languages, including the
Bihari languages except
Maithili, all the
Rajasthani languages, the
Central Pahari languages and most
Western Pahari languages. 258 million people in India (25% of the population) regarded their
native language to be "Hindi", however, including other languages considered by the census as Hindi, this figure becomes 422 million Hindi speakers (41% of the population). These figures do not count 52 million Indians who considered their mother tongue to be "Urdu", which is informally mutually intelligible with Hindi. The numbers are also not directly comparable to the table above; for example, while independent estimates in 2001 counted 37 million speakers of Awadhi, in the 2001 census only 2½ million of these identified their language as "Awadhi" rather than as "Hindi". There have been demands to include
Awadhi,
Bhojpuri,
Kumaoni,
Bundeli,
Chhattisgarhi,
Garhwali,
Kudmali/Kurmali,
Magahi,
Nagpuri, and
Rajasthani in the
Eighth Schedule; these are otherwise regarded as dialects of Hindi by the government, although they have varying levels of mutual intelligibility with standard Hindi. Some academics oppose inclusion of Hindi dialects in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution as full-fledged Indian languages. According to them recognition of Hindi dialects as separate languages would deprive Hindi of millions of its speakers and eventually no Hindi will be left.
Outside the Indian subcontinent Much of the Hindi spoken outside of the subcontinent is distinct from the Indian standard language.
Fiji Hindi is a derived form of Awadhi, Bhojpuri, and including some English and very few native
Fijian words. It is spoken by majority of
Indo-Fijians. In Mauritius,
Bhojpuri is the most commonly spoken Indian language. Once widely spoken as a mother tongue at 31.7% in 1972, it has become less commonly spoken over the years. According to the 2022 census, Bhojpuri was the most commonly spoken language at home for only 5.1% of the population, though the per cent of the population fluent in the language is likely still around 36.7%, according to Anjani Murdan of the Mauritius Times. ==Geography and demography==