Bibles

Hindi

Hindi, formerly called Hundustani, is a major Indian language, spoken natively by 250 million people, mainly in northern India. Hindi is derived from Sanskrit, and is written in Devanagari script in India, but is written in the Persian script in Pakistan where it is called Urdu. It is an official language of India along with English. Modern Indian Bible translations were first made by the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) who translated part of the Scriptures into Hindi in 1806, the New Testament was published in 1811 and the first full Bible appeared in 1835, called the Old Version (OV), now revised as the Revised Version (RV). Hindi speaking Christians are Catholic or evangelical Protestant, especially Church of North India and Baptist. Today Bible work is done by the Bible Society of India. A Hindi Common Language (CL) edition produced in 1983.