Hindi is the first official language of India and is spoken by about 180 million people, principally in northern India. There are approximately 300 million second-language speakers. Hindi is closely related to Urdu, but Hindi is written in the Devanagari script while Urdu is written in a Persian script, and the Hindi vocabulary has been purged of Persian and Arabic words. Hindi is the second most-spoken language in the world after Mandarin Chinese. •See also Indo-Iranian languages. Ref: UCLA Language Materials Project, Ethnologue, Wikipedia