Difference Between Hindi and Nepali

Hindi vs Nepali

Hindi and Nepali are the two prominent languages spoken in South Asia. Hindi and Nepali are very similar to each other, but they have some differences.

Both countries are multilingual. While Hindi is spoken by about 180 million natives, Nepali is spoken by 13.9 million natives. Nepali or Nepalese is spoken by 70 percent of the people in Nepal, and Hindi is spoken by a mere 41 percent of the people in India. Both languages are spoken in India as well as Nepal. As per the census of 1991, there are 489,578 Hindi speakers present in Nepal. The population of Nepali speakers in India is 2,500,000 according to the 2001 census.

Hindi is spoken mainly in the Republic of India, and Nepali is the main language of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal. Both Hindi and Nepali are Indo-Aryan languages. They follow the same script which is the Devanagari script. The Devanagari script, which is generally known as Nagari, is written from left to right. The order of the letters made up of vowels and consonants is known as the “varnamala” which means the “garland of flowers.” In the Unicode Conventional, the Devanagari is constituted in three blocks. U+0900–U+097F comprises the Devanagari, U+1CD0–U+1CFF comprises the Devanagari Extended, and U+A8E0–U+A8FF comprises the Vedic Extension. The gray areas within these indicate the non-assigned value factors.

Nepali

Nepali is the official language of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal. It was initially called Gorkhali which was later changed to Nepali which is adapted from the word Newari. The language has three major dialects which are eastern, western, and central.

In Nepali there is almost a negligible difference between the sounds /s/ and /sh/, /g/, /jure/, and /f/. Also the sound of “swah” and /^/ are the same. The Nepali language lacks articles. The nouns are either masculine or feminine. Nepali distinguishes between existential and definitive functions of verb “to be.” For instance, “pānī ho?” means “is this water?” while “pānī cha?” means “is there any water?” It also uses numeral classifiers as in “tīnjanā mānche,” which means “three men pointing towards a person.” When talking about an object such as a chair, we have the verb “tīnva ā mec” which means “three chairs.”

Hindi

Hindi is the main and most spoken language of the Republic of India, but unlike Nepali, it does not enjoy the status of being the national language. Hindi is supposed to have originated in the 4th century. The original Hindi used a Brahmi script. The present form, called standard Hindi, makes use of the Devanagari script.

Like Nepali, Hindi also has masculine or feminine nouns. However, it lacks any differentiation between the existential and definitive function of verb “to be.”

Summary:

1. Nepali is the national language of the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal while Hindi is not the national language of any country.
2. There are many differences between the grammar of the two languages.
3. The two languages differ phonemically also.