_a._ North-western group: Kāshmīrī 1,007,957 Kohistānī 36 Lahndā 3,337,917 Sindhī 3,494,971 _b._ Southern language: Marāthī 18,237,899 _c._ Eastern group: Bihārī 34,579,844 Oriyā 9,687,429 Bengali 44,624,048 Assamese 1,350,846 Of all these modern languages, their idioms, their characters, their literature, I do not venture to give even a summarised account. Those who have any curiosity to learn more about them cannot do better than consult Sir George Grierson's work on _The Languages of India_, until it, in its turn, is superseded by the book he is now writing from the materials collected in his _Linguistic Survey_. But everyone who has read _The Newcomes_ will want to know what Hindustāni is, especially as it is one of the languages prescribed for the study of probationers for the Indian Civil Service and is taught at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London, and Dublin. In the strictest sense Hindustāni is the dialect of western Hindi spoken between Meerut and Delhi. It was much cultivated, as a literary dialect, by both Hindus and Musalmāns. The latter wrote, and write it, in the Persian character, and have added a large number of Persian and Arabic words. In this Persianised form it is known as Urdū, "a name derived from the _Urdū-e mu 'alla_, or royal military bazaar outside the imperial palace at Delhi, where it is supposed to have had its origin." Under Muhammadan rule Urdū was almost as much the _lingua franca_ of India as English has come to be in modern times.