Hindi Diwas 2019: Date, History & Significance of this Day in India

Every year, September 14 is celebrated as Hindi Diwas. On this day in 1950, the Constituent Assembly of India had adopted Hindi, an Indo-Aryan language, written in Devanagari script as one of the official languages of the Republic of India. Spoken by around 40% of the Indian population, Hindi is one of the 22 scheduled languages of the country.

The word ‘Hindi’ came from a Persian word ‘Hind’, which means the land of the Indus River. Released in 1913, Raja Harishchandra is the first Hindi film. The movie was directed by Dadasaheb Phalke.

Today, Hindi is the fourth most spoken language in the world after English, Spanish and Mandarin.

Stalwarts like Beohar Rajendra Simha, Hazari Prasad Dwivedi, Kaka Kalelkar, Maithili Sharan Gupt and Seth Govind Das lobbied hard in favour of Hindi to be made the official language of India.