What is The Relation Between Sanskrit and Hindi?

     The relationship between these Sanskrit and Hindi languages is not as direct and as old as it appears. Sanskrit always had various spoken dialects all through its area of influence. But on the periphery of the main heart land, for example, in Bengal, Orissa, Marathwada and Gujarat, the impact of spoken dialects was much more prominent. This situation resulted in origin of vernacular languages in all these regions with almost direct impact of Sanskrit. But the situation in UP, Bihar, MP and Rajasthan was somewhat different. These areas came in touch with cultural baggage of the invaders right from tenth century CE. The spoken dialects in this area, the Khadi Boli with its variants (which chiefly included Avadhi, Brij, Bundelkhandi), continued absorbing many words and idioms from the territory of foreign rulers and invaders as many of their soldiers and traders, etc. got settled in these areas. By the time of Mughal Empire, the spoken language called 'Hindustani' had taken a distinct form with sizable impact of Turkish and Central Asian culture.

Sanskrit and Hindi

      In due course, the Hindustani got written both in Arabian script and in Devnagri script. This is how a single spoken language got divided into two distinct written languages called Urdu and Hindi respectively. In addition to commonality of Devnagri being used as script for both Sanskrit and Hindi, the later also borrows grammatical structure of Sanskrit. And as part of bigger family structure, Hindi also draws a lot many words from Sanskrit (like every other languages of India with the exception of Tamil and its three cousins). But a bulk of vocabulary of Hindi is derived from the mix of North Indian dialects and Persian.

      The dialectology of Hindi proper is split in several separate groups. On west of north India we have Brij Bhasha, Haryanvi, Rajasthani and Bundelkhaandi while on the eastern side we have Awadhi, Bagheli, Bhojpuri, Magadhi and Chhattisgarhi. Similarly, we also come across western version of Hindustani Hindi called Bambaiya Hindi where Marathi influences it. Not far away; one can see it as Dakhini where erstwhile Hyderabad State was using it as Hyderabadi Hindustani. As such, Hindi is somewhat an ambiguous language with many variants. Against this, Sanskrit has always been a single version language with complete grammar and mathematics like discipline preventing any regional influence.

      The derivation of Hindi proper from Sanskrit is many stepped and can be looked as under:

Sanskrit

   Central Zone Languages

      Western Zone Languages

         Hindustani

            Khariboli

               Hindi

      The real impetus to Hindi came only after independence in 1947 when Hindi got adopted as a national language. As such, Sanskrit has much less direct impact on Hindi in comparison to its impact on other northern regional languages except that it shares Devnagri as a common script.