1. INTRODUCTION
of the 20th century. On the one hand, there were proponents of Hindi
and Urdu who were eager to maintain separate linguistic identities,
and, on the other hand, some national leaders wanted to develop
Hindustani as a combined linguist identity on the basis of its use by
the general population.
1.4. Linguistic Characteristics
Hindi shares major linguistic characteristics with other Indo-Aryan
languages. It has ten vowels. The length of vowels is phonemic. All
vowels can be nasalized and nasalization is phonemic. The Hindi
syllable contains a vowel as its nucleus, followed or preceded by
consonants. Words usually have two or three syllables.
Nouns are inflected for number, gender and case. There are two
numbers: singular and plural, two genders: masculine and feminine;
and two cases: direct and oblique. Nouns are assigned one of the two
genders. The gender of inanimate objects is not predictable from the
form or meaning. Pronouns are inflected for number and case.
Adjectives are of two types: declinable and indeclinable. The first
type is uninflected for number, gender, and case, whereas the second
type is not.
Verbs are inflected for person, number, gender, tense, mood, and
aspect. There are three tenses: present, past, and future; three moods:
imperative, indicative, and subjective; two aspects: imperfective and
perfective. Hindi is a verb-final language.
Hindi is written in the Devanagari script which originated from
Brahmi. The Devanagari script for Hindi is standardized, but certain
minor variations still exist. In this grammar we are using Devanagari
and Roman scripts for the data from the language.
1.5. Status
As stated above, Hindi is the official language of the Union of India
and ten states. It is spoken by the largest number of people in India.
It is widely used in administration, education, and mass media.
The use of Hindi in administration at the Union level as well as in
the Hindi speaking states is not free from problems (Koul 1994a).
There are some serious gaps in the Official Language Policy (OLP),