[dragonwriter]

> That's because Hindi is no-one's native language, it's an artificial language that was invented by a committee.

More accurately, Modern Standard Hindi (like Modern Standard Urdu) is a committee-standardized register of the Hindustani (also known as "Hindi-Urdu") language. (prior to standardization, "Hindi", "Urdu", and "Hindustani" all referred to the same language, apparently.)

> Mandarin is almost the same situation, except that it is very very close to the native language of Beijing and Northeast China.

Hindustani has 240 million native speakers.

[newsign]

Also those people are purely native speakers, meaning people whose first language is Hindi - while there are many whose command over Hindi is very strong but their first language is Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi etc.

If you count all those people who can speak/write Hindi then the count goes way over 500 Million ....