Fiji Hindi

Fiji Hindi
Fiji Hindi
Fiji Baat
फ़िजी हिंदी (Devanagari script)
	Fiji Hindi written in the Devanagari script
Native to	Fiji
Ethnicity	Indo-Fijians and the Indo-Fijian diaspora
Native speakers	(380,000 cited 1991)
Language family	Indo-European Indo-Iranian Indo-Aryan Central and Eastern Eastern Hindi and Bihari Awadhi, Bhojpuri and Maithili Fiji Hindi; ; ; ; ; ;
Early forms	Vedic Sanskrit Classical Sanskrit Ardhamagadhi and Magadhi Prakrit Ardhamagadhi and Magadhan Apabhraṃśa Abahattha Awadhi and Bhojpuri ; ; ; ; ;
Dialects	Pidgin Hindustani;
Writing system	Devanagari (co-official) ; Latin (co-official) ;
Language codes
ISO 639-3	hif
Glottolog	fiji1242
Linguasphere	59-AAF-raf

Fiji Hindi (Devanagari: फ़िजी हिंदी) is a vernacular Eastern Hindi language spoken by Indo-Fijians. It is the mother tongue and indigenous language of Indo-Fijians. It is also looked at as a creole or koine language based on Awadhi that has also been subject to considerable influence by other Eastern Hindi languages or language families such as Bhojpuri, Maithili, Bagheli and Chhattisgarhi, and has also been partially influenced by many other languages such as English, iTaukei, Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Assamese, Punjabi, Western Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Gujarati, Arabic, and Malayalam. Many words unique to Fiji Hindi have been created to cater for the new environment that Indo-Fijians now live in. First-generation Indo-Fijians in Fiji, who used the language as a lingua franca in Fiji, referred to it as Fiji Baat, "Fiji talk".

While Fiji Hindi is mutually intelligible with various Eastern Hindi languages, it is also closely related to other variants of Hindustani spoken in the Caribbean (such as Sarnami) and Africa (especially in the countries of Mauritius and South Africa).