Awadhi

Linguistically separate, officially grouped together. Hindi and Awadhi share an Indo-Aryan grammatical core, but Awadhi has distinct verb conjugations, pronouns, and vocabulary, and is not fully mutually intelligible with Standard Hindi. The Indian census classifies Awadhi under Hindi for political-administrative reasons, even though linguists treat it as a separate language.

Substantial. Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas (1574) is the most famous Awadhi text — a retelling of the Ramayana that became central to North Indian Hindu devotional life. Earlier Awadhi works include Malik Muhammad Jayasi's Padmavat (1540), one of the earliest surviving Sufi poems in an Indian vernacular. Awadhi maintained an active literary identity for centuries before being administratively folded under Hindi in the modern era.

Across the historical Awadh region of central and eastern Uttar Pradesh — districts including Lucknow, Kanpur, Faizabad, Sultanpur, Sitapur, and many others. Awadhi is also spoken in adjacent parts of Nepal's Terai region, and by descendants of indentured workers in Mauritius, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Fiji.

No formal official recognition in India, where it falls under the broader Hindi rubric in census and government. There have been campaigns for inclusion among the 22 scheduled languages, but they haven't yet succeeded. Nepal's 2015 constitution recognizes Awadhi as one of the country's national languages, alongside Maithili and Bhojpuri.

Yes — historically in Devanagari (the dominant modern script) and Kaithi (a related Brahmic script formerly used across the eastern Hindi belt, now archaic). Both Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas and Jayasi's Padmavat were written in Awadhi using scripts of their period. Modern Awadhi publishing uses Devanagari almost exclusively.