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 language and Bhojpuri language. 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 ( Devanagari: हिन्दी, Hindī), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in North 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
