Languages with official status in India
The Constitution of India designates the official language of the Government of India as Hindi written in the Devanagari script, as well as English. There is no national language as declared by the Constitution of India. Hindi is used for official purposes such as parliamentary proceedings, judiciary, communications between the Central Government and a State Government. States within India have the liberty and powers to specify their own official language(s) through legislation and therefore there are 22 officially recognized languages in India of which Hindi is the most used. The number of native Hindi speakers is about 25% of the total Indian population; however, including dialects of Hindi termed as Hindi languages, the total is around 44% of Indians, mostly accounted from the states falling under the Hindi belt. Other Indian languages are each spoken by around 10% or less of the population.
Hindi–Urdu controversy
Hindi is a literary register of the Hindustani language, derived from the Khariboli dialect of the Hindi languages. A Persianized variant of Hindustani began to take shape during the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526 AD) and Mughal Empire (1526–1858 AD) in South Asia. Urdu, along with English, became the first official language of British India in 1850. Urdu was being written, spoken and translated to and from English in all courts, schools, official documents, and government institutes. Although the need to have a language for Hindus developed in the 1850s, the irrevocable momentum of the Hindi language movement occurred around 1880. Urdu is a name derived from the Turkic word "ordu" (army) or "orda". When the Turco-Persian Mughals who invaded the Indian subcontinent made camps, the colloquial Persian spoken by the soldiers, known as the "language of the camp", or ""Zaban-i-Ordu"", became gradually more and more Indianised, as they themselves settled and married into the local communities, until the dialect they spoke was readily intelligible to the native Hindu population.