INTRODUCTION: Hindi is a language spoken throughout most of northern India, although it is understood in much of the rest of the country. It may be used to describe either the language known as standard Hindi, spoken mostly in India, or increasingly, to describe the combined language of Hindustani, which also includes a standard form known as Urdu. The main distinction between standard Hindi and Urdu are their writing systems, and most people consider the two to be different registers of the same language.

The differing definitions of what does or does not constitute Hindi, as opposed to Hindustani, and whether some speech patterns constitute a dialect or an entirely different language, make pinpointing the exact number of Hindi speakers difficult. Estimates range as high as 800 million speakers worldwide, making it the second-most spoken language on Earth. Even conservative estimates place the number of total speakers at about 500 million. Hindi is part of the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages, along with languages such as Punjabi, Bengali, and Nepali. It is often known as the language of songs, because of the many epic poems and songs in Hindi.

The Hindi department of Jagjivan College, Ara was established in 1959.