The language of the United Provinces, and of considerable districts to west, south, and east of them, is Hindi, the most direct derivative of the ancient Sanskrit tongue, whose use was contemporary with that of Latin and Greek. All three of these ancient tongues, as well as Old Persian, belong to the family of the Indo-European languages. Sanskrit was brought into India by a conquering people from the northwest. Hindi is now spoken by a hundred million people in all the northern centre of India. It is the language not only of the United Provinces but also of the western part of Bengal which is known as Behar, of that part of the Punjab which surrounds Delhi, and of a wide district in Central India ruled by the great Maratha chiefs, Sindhia and Holkar. Other tongues of similar origin are spoken in the regions around—Bengali in Bengal, Marathi and Gujrati in the lands which lie east and north of Bombay, and Punjabi in the Punjab. We must think of these various Indian languages as differing from one another much as French and Spanish and Italian differ, which are all derived from a common Latin source. The Hindi language was picked up by the Musulman conquerors of India, and by adding to it words of their own Persian speech they formed Urdu, the language of the camp. This is the language of educated Musulmans all over India to this day. Under the name of Hindustani it has become a sort of _lingua franca_ throughout India, and is used by Europeans when talking to their servants. Away to the south, beyond the limit of the Sanskrit tongues, in the province of Madras and neighbouring areas, are talked languages wholly alien from Sanskrit, and differing from Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujrati, and Punjabi, much as the Turkish and Hungarian languages differ from the group of allied Indo-European tongues spoken in Western Europe. These southern Indian tongues are known as Dravidian. The most important of them are Telugu, spoken by twenty millions, and Tamil, spoken by some fifteen millions. The Hindu religion, however, is held by the great majority both of the Dravidian south and of the Indo-European north and centre.