Īnother name Hindavī ( हिन्दवी) or Hinduī ( हिन्दुई) (from Persian: هندوی 'of or belonging to the Hindu/Indian people') was often used in the past, for example by Amir Khusrow in his poetry. It was borrowed from Classical Persian هندی Hindī ( Iranian Persian pronunciation: Hendi), meaning 'of or belonging to Hind (India)' (hence, 'Indian').

The term Hindī originally was used to refer to inhabitants of the Indo-Gangetic Plain.

According to reports of Ethnologue (2022, 25th edition) Hindi is the third most-spoken language in the world including first and second language speakers. If counted together with the mutually intelligible Urdu, it is the third most-spoken language in the world, after Mandarin and English. Hindi is the fourth most-spoken first language in the world, after Mandarin, Spanish and English. Apart from the script and formal vocabulary, standard Hindi is mutually intelligible with standard Urdu, another recognised register of Hindustani as both share a common colloquial base. Such languages include Fiji Hindi, which has an official status in Fiji, and Caribbean Hindustani, which is spoken in Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana. Outside India, several other languages are recognised officially as 'Hindi' but do not refer to the Standard Hindi language described here and instead descend from other nearby languages, such as Awadhi and Bhojpuri. It is also spoken, to a lesser extent, in other parts of India (usually in a simplified or pidginised variety such as Bazaar Hindustani or Haflong Hindi). Hindi is the lingua franca of the Hindi Belt. Hindi is also one of the 22 scheduled languages of the Republic of India. It is an official language in nine states and three union territories and an additional official language in three other states. Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, is one of the two official languages of the Government of India, along with English. Hindi has been described as a standardised and Sanskritised register of the Hindustani language, which itself is based primarily on the Khariboli dialect of Delhi and neighbouring areas of North India. Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: मानक हिन्दी Mānak Hindī), commonly referred to as Hindi ( Devanāgarī: हिन्दी, Hindī), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in Northern India, and serves as the lingua franca of the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Distribution of L1 self-reported speakers of Hindi in India as per the 2011 Census.

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