Difference Between Hindi and Gujarati

Hindi vs Gujarati

The Republic of India is a land where multilingual people live in perfect harmony. There are almost 200 languages that are spoken and recognized in this country. The differences between Hindi and Gujarati are very similar to those differences between Italian and Spanish or German and Dutch. Both Hindi and Gujarati languages share many similarities.

Hindi

Hindi is the main official language of the Republic of India. It is used by about 41 percent of the population. Hindi is spoken mainly in the northern states of the country namely Rajasthan, Delhi, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Himachal Pradesh. Hindi is also spoken and understood in parts in countries such as Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Fiji.

Hindi follows the Devanagari script. The Devanagari script, commonly called Nagari is written from left to right. It lacks any letter case system, and it has a line that runs along the letters at the top. The letter order constituting the vowels and consonants is called the “varnamala” which means the “garland of flowers.” In the Unicode Standard, the Devanagari is constituted in three blocks. U+0900–U+097F constitutes the Devanagari, U+1CD0–U+1CFF constitutes the Devanagari Extended, and U+A8E0–U+A8FF constitutes the Vedic Extension. The grey areas within these codes indicate the non-assigned code points.

Hindi dates its origin back to the 4th century AD. The original script of Hindi was Brahmi. The use of the Devanagari script for Hindi is said to have been started in around the 11th  century AD. The first book printed in Hindi was Grammar of the Hindostanee Language by John Gilchrist in 1796.

Sample Hindi Script

मीडिया रिपोर्टों के मुताबिक शुक्रवार को न सिर्फ गर्मी ने अपना असर दिखाया लेकिन राजधानी दिल्ली में बिजली की खपत ने भी रिकॉर्ड तोड़ दिया. रिपोर्टों में कहा गया है कि दिल्ली में शुक्रवार दोपहर को बिजली की माँग 5032 मेगावाट तक पहुँच गई थी. गर्मी के कारण दिल्ली में बिजली की माँग हर साल बढ़ जाती है.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/hindi/india/2012/05/120525_heat_wave_india_va.shtml

Gujarati

Gujarati is the language native to the state of Gujarat of the Republic of India. There are about 67 million speakers for this language. Due to this it is ranked 26th in the list of most spoken languages. It is spoken most prominently in the Republic of India, Pakistan, U.S., U.K., and also in countries such as South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Australia, Mauritius, and many more. Gujarati is the official language in Gujarat, Daman, Diu, and Dadra and Nagar Haveli in the Republic of India.

Gujarati is an Indo-Aryan language evolved from Sanskrit. The main phonological characteristics of this language include the loss of phonemic lengths for vowels and a  change of consonant clusters to germinate and then form single consonants. Considering the morphology, this language has a reduced number of consonants. The duals are merged with the plurals, and the language has developed a periphrastic tense, voice, or mood constructions.

Gujarati is divided into three historical stages: the old Gujarati, the middle Gujarati, and the modern Gujarati. The old Gujarati is said to have reigned from 1100 to 1500 AD, the middle Gujarati reigned from 1500 to 1800 AD, while the modern form dates from 1800 AD to the present day.

The script of this language is Devanagari with the omission of the top horizontal line above the words. The Unicode Standard for Gujarati is U+0A80–U+0AFF.

Sample Gujarati script

ગાંધીજીની ઝૂંપડી-કરાડી

જગ પ્રસિદ્ધ દાંડી કૂચ પછી ગાંધીજીએ અહીં આંબાના વૃક્ષ નીચે ખજૂરી નાં છટિયાંની એક ઝૂંપડીમાં તા.૧૪-૪-૧૯૩૦ થી તા.૪-૫-૧૯૩૦ સુધી નિવાસ કર્યો હતો. દાંડીમાં છઠ્ઠી એપ્રિલે શરૂ કરેલી નિમક કાનૂન (મીઠાના સત્યાગ્રહ) ભંગની લડતને તેમણે અહીંથી વેગ આપી દેશ વ્યાપી બનાવી હતી. અહીંથી જ તેમણે ધરાસણાના મીઠાના અગરો તરફ કૂચ કરવાનો પોતાનો સંકલ્પ બ્રિટિશ વાઈસરૉયને પત્ર લખીને જણાવ્યો હતો.

તા.૪થી મે ૧૯૩૦ની રાતના બાર વાગ્યા પછી આ સ્થળેથી બ્રિટિશ સરકારે તેમની ધરપકડ કરી હતી.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gujarati_Language

Summary

1. The writing system of Hindi has a top horizontal line above each word while this top line is absent in Gujarati writing.
2. The alphabets of the two languages also differ slightly.

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