Hindi and Urdu are generally considered to be one spoken language with two different literary traditions. That means that Hindi and Urdu speakers who shop in the same markets have no problems understanding each other -- they'd both say yeh kitne kaa hay for 'How much is it? And the Urdu one will be یہ کتنے کا ہے؟ Hindi is written from left to right in the Devanagari script, and is the official language of India, along with English.
Urdu, on the other hand, is written from right to left in the Nastaliq script and is the national language of Pakistan. It's also one of the official languages of the Indian states of Bihar and Jammu & Kashmir. Considered as one, these tongues constitute the second most spoken language in the world, sometimes called Hindustani. In their daily lives, Hindi and Urdu speakers communicate in their 'different' languages without major problems. Both Hindi and Urdu developed from Classical Sanskrit, which appeared in the Indus Valley at about the start of the Common Era.
The first old Hindi poetry was written in the year 769 AD, and by the European Middle Ages it became known as 'Hindvi'. Muslim Turks invaded the Punjab in 1027 and took control of Delhi in 1193. They paved the way for the Islamic Mughal Empire, which ruled northern India from the 16th century until it was defeated by the British Raj in the mid-19th century.
It was at this time that the language of this book began to take form, a mixture of Hindvi grammar with Arabic, Persian and Turkish vocabulary. The Muslim speakers of Hindvi began to write in the Arabic script, creating Urdu, while the Hindu population incorporated the new words but continued to write in Devanagari script. Hindi and Urdu developed from the "khari boli" dialect spoken in the Delhi region of northern India. Along with this common origin, Hindi and Urdu also share the same grammar and most of the basic vocabulary of everyday speech; but they have developed as two separate languages in terms of script, higher vocabulary, and cultural ambiance.
Urdu, written in a modified form of the Persian script, and rich in loanwords from Persian and Arabic, has a broadly Islamic orientation, especially in its rightly celebrated poetry. Hindi, on the other hand, written in the Devanagari script that it shares with Sanskrit, traces a long history through largely Hindu culture. Like siblings separated at birth in a Hindi movie , the two languages live parallel lives, sometimes closely aligned, sometimes standing at a distance from each other. The most graphic difference lies in the two scripts; students in the Hindi Urdu Flagship acquire a comfortable literacy in both. Urdu, which was often referred to by the British administrators in India as the Hindustani language, was promoted in colonial India by British policies to counter the previous emphasis on Persian. Urdu replaced Persian as the official language of India in 1837 and was made co-official, along with English.
Standard Urdu has approximately the twentieth largest population of native speakers, among all languages. It is the national language of Pakistan, as well as one of the twenty-three official languages of India. Urdu is often contrasted with Hindi, another standardized form of Hindustani. Linguists nonetheless consider Urdu and Hindi to be two standardized forms of the same language. In general, the term "Urdu" can encompass dialects of Hindustani other than the standardised versions.
The standard Urdu language has approximately the twentieth largest population of native speakers, among all languages. It is the national language of Pakistan as well as one of the 21 official languages of India. There are 60,503,579 people speaking Urdu language on world total basis. I think it would be most accurate to describe Hindi/Urdu as a single language with two separate literary cultures utilizing two distinct scripts. It would be incorrect to say that 'hindi is from sanskrit and urdu is from arabic/persian,' because both use a grammatical structure that is fundamentally indo-iranian, not semetic .
Urdu does emphasize arabo-farsic vocabulary, but hindi includes many, many words from a arabic and farsi. An oft sighted example is the many words we use to express love, e.g., pyaar, prem, ishq, mohabbat etc...of which, only one is derived from sanskrit. I challenge any shud hindi speaker to speak for a day without using any words from arabic and farsi, it is nearly impossible , as even the most common words (e.g. Kitaab) have an arabic root.
That being said, written hindi does tend to emphasize sanskit-derived words, as written urdu emphasizes words having an arabic/farsi root. Urdu developed as local Indo-Aryan dialects came under the influence of the Muslim courts that ruled South Asia from the early thirteenth century. The official language of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and their successor states, as well as the cultured language of poetry and literature, was Persian, while the language of religion was Arabic. Most of the Sultans and nobility in the Sultanate period were Persianized Turks from Central Asia who spoke Turkish as their mother tongue.
The Mughals were also from Persianized Central Asia, but spoke Turkish as their first language; however the Mughals later adopted Persian. Persian became the preferred language of the Muslim elite of north India before the Mughals entered the scene. Babur's mother tongue was Turkish and he wrote exclusively in Turkish. His son and successor Humayun also spoke and wrote in Turkish. Muzaffar Alam, a noted scholar of Mughal and Indo-Persian history, suggests that Persian became the lingua franca of the empire under Akbar for various political and social factors due to its non-sectarian and fluid nature.
The mingling of these languages led to a vernacular that is the ancestor of today's Urdu. Dialects of this vernacular are spoken today in cities and villages throughout Pakistan and northern India. Cities with a particularly strong tradition of Urdu include Hyderabad, Karachi, Lucknow, and Lahore.
The major difference is that of script where urdu is written in persio-arabic script while hindi in devnagari. Both were almost similar languages in oral form 250 years back but now are different from each other due to persianization of urdu n sanskritization of hindi. Also hindi is the mother tongue of less than 50% of indians. There are hundreds of millions of tamil,telugu,bengali,punjabi,marathi,etc etc whose languages r entirely different from hindi.
A language 'invented' to serve a specific purpose, such as enabling the troops to communicate with one another, is labelled as 'artificial' by linguists. Though there have been hundreds of such attempts, some aimed at facilitating international communication between nations and peoples speaking different languages, none has been successful. Esperanto, a language formed with the basic roots of some European languages, died despite its early success. In other words, experiments to devise a language have failed and no artificial language could survive. Urdu, like other languages of the world, has been classified by linguists on the basis of its morphological and syntactical features.
Urdu nouns and adjective can have a variety of origins, such as Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Pushtu and even Portuguese, but ninety-nine per cent of Urdu verbs have their roots in Sanskrit/Prakrit. So it is an Indo-Aryan language which is a branch of Indo-Iranian family, which in turn is a branch of Indo-European family of languages. According to Dr Gian Chand Jain, Indo-Aryan languages had three phases of evolution beginning around 1,500 BC and passing through the stages of Vedic Sanskrit, classical Sanskrit and Pali. They developed into Prakrit and Apbhransh, which served as the basis for the formation of later local dialects.
Recognising that Persian, the official language of the Mughals, was rarely spoken by the common people, the government of the newly colonised British Raj decided to replace it with Hindustani, written only in the Perso-Arabic script. This triggered a reaction from Hindus across the subcontinent, for many who had grown up with the local Devanagari alphabet now felt pushed aside by the new policy. Politics started erecting linguistic barriers between communities who were heretofore united. This was not because of the contents of the dialects themselves, but because Muslims were simply more likely to be familiar with the Perso-Arabic script and thus benefited from the change. It wasn't long after that the terms Hindi and Urdu started to take religious connotations – with Hindi being seen as a language for Hindus, and Urdu for Muslims. Urdu is a member of the Indo-Aryan family of languages , which is in turn a branch of the Indo-Iranian group (which comprises the Indo-Aryan and the Iranian branches), which itself is a member of the Indo-European linguistic family.
If Hindi and Urdu are considered to be the same language (Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu), then Urdu can be considered to be a part of a dialect continuum which extends across eastern Iran, Afghanistan and modern Pakistan, right into eastern India. These idioms all have similar grammatical structures and share a large portion of their vocabulary. Punjabi, for instance, is very similar to Urdu; Punjabi written in the Shahmukhi script can be understood by speakers of Urdu with little difficulty, but spoken Punjabi has a very different phonology and can be harder to understand for Urdu speakers. Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and is spoken and understood throughout the country, where it shares official language status with English. It holds in itself a repository of the cultural, religious and social heritage of the country. Although English is used in most elite circles, and Punjabi has a plurality of native speakers, Urdu is the lingua franca and is expected to prevail.
Historically, Hindustani developed in the post-12th century period under the impact of the incoming Afghans and Turks as a linguistic modus vivendi from the sub-regional apabhramshas of north-western India. Its first major folk poet was the great Persian master, Amir Khusrau (1253–1325), who is known to have composed dohas and riddles in the newly-formed speech, then called 'Hindavi'. Through the medieval time, this mixed speech was variously called by various speech sub-groups as 'Hindavi', 'Zaban-e-Hind', 'Hindi', 'Zaban-e-Dehli', 'Rekhta', 'Gujarii. 'Dakkhani', 'Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla', 'Zaban-e-Urdu', or just 'Urdu'. By the late 11th century, the name 'Hindustani' was in vogue and had become the lingua franca for most of northern India. A sub-dialect called Khari Boli was spoken in and around the Delhi region at the start of the 13th century when the Delhi Sultanate was established.
Khari Boli gradually became the prestige dialect of Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) and became the basis of modern Standard Hindi & Urdu. Fresh data from the 2011 census says that Urdu is the seventh most spoken language in India. It is one of the 22 official languages recognised in the Constitution of India, having official status in Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Bengal and Delhi, while it has the status of official language of Jammu and Kashmir.
Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and is a registered regional language of Nepal. The diverse linguistic heritage of Nepal stems from various language groups including Tibeto-Burman, Indo-Aryan, and numerous indigenous dialects. According to the 2011 census, about 2.6% of the residents were Urdu speakers. The official language of Nepal is Nepali, while Urdu is a registered regional dialect of Nepal. Some of the local dialects spoken in the southern Madhesh area include Urdu, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, and Maithili.
Because of their great similarities of grammar and core vocabularies, many linguists do not distinguish between Hindi and Urdu as separate languages, at least not in reference to the informal spoken registers. For them, ordinary informal Urdu and Hindi can be seen as variants of the same language with the difference being that Urdu is supplemented with a Perso-Arabic vocabulary and Hindi a Sanskritic vocabulary. Additionally, there is the convention of Urdu being written in Perso-Arabic script, and Hindi in Devanagari. The standard, "proper" grammars of both languages are based on Khariboli grammar, the dialect of the Delhi region. So, with respect to grammar, the languages are mutually intelligible when spoken, and can be thought of as the same language. It is the national language in Pakistan and one of the official languages of India.
Spoken by an estimated 165 million people around the world – It has more native speakers in India than in Pakistan. Urdu is often contrasted with Hindi language, another standardised form of Hindustani. The main difference between the Hindi and Urdu is that Standard Urdu is written in Nastaliq calligraphy style of the Perso-Arabic script. While the standard Hindi is written in Devanagari, has inherited significant vocabulary from Sanskrit Langauge.
Linguists therefore consider Urdu and Hindi to be two standardized forms of the same language. According to the 1999 data, Hindi/Urdu is the fifth most spoken language in the world. According to Comerie , Hindi-Urdu is the second most spoken language in the world, with 330 million native speakers, after Mandarin and possibly English. Hindi belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Hindi, along with English, are the official languages of India.
Hindi is also the official language of Bihar, Delhi, Haryana, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh. In Chhattisgarh, one of the dialects of Hindi, namely Chhattisgarhi, has recently been made the official language of the state. According to the Census of India, 2001, Hindi is spoken by 422,048,642 speakers which include the speakers of its various dialects and variations of speech grouped under Hindi. Although Persian was the official language, used at the Imperial court and within the socio-economic institutions of the time, Arabic remained as the official language of the Muslim religion in the Indian subcontinent. When written, however, they use different alphabets and scripts. Indian Hindus, people who practice Hinduism, often speak Hindi.
Indian Muslims, people who practice Islam, often speak Urdu. Scholars sometimes speak of the two languages collectively as Hindi-Urdu. Hindi-Urdu is the main language used in Indian films and in much Indian popular music. The Persians used it to refer to the Indian people and to the languages they spoke. Scholars postulate that Hindi developed in the 8th-10th centuries from khari boli , spoken around Dehli and adopted by the Moslem invaders to communicate with the local population.
Eventually, it developed into a variety called Urdū (from Turkish ordu 'camp'), characterized by numerous borrowings from Persian and Arabic, which became a literary language. In the meantime, the language of the indigenous population remained relatively free of borrowings from Persian and Arabic, and instead borrowed words and literary conventions from Sanskrit. Mutual intelligibility decreases in literary and specialised contexts that rely on academic or technical vocabulary. In a longer conversation, differences in formal vocabulary and pronunciation of some Urdu phonemes are noticeable, though many native Hindi speakers also pronounce these phonemes. At a phonological level, speakers of both languages are frequently aware of the Perso-Arabic or Sanskrit origins of their word choice, which affects the pronunciation of those words.
Urdu speakers will often insert vowels to break up consonant clusters found in words of Sanskritic origin, but will pronounce them correctly in Arabic and Persian loanwords. As a result of religious nationalism since the partition of British India and continued communal tensions, native speakers of both Hindi and Urdu frequently assert that they are distinct languages. Owing to interaction with other languages, Urdu has become localized wherever it is spoken, including in Pakistan. Urdu in Pakistan has undergone changes and has incorporated and borrowed many words from regional languages, thus allowing speakers of the language in Pakistan to distinguish themselves more easily and giving the language a decidedly Pakistani flavour.
Is Urdu A Language Similarly, the Urdu spoken in India can also be distinguished into many dialects such as the Standard Urdu of Lucknow and Delhi, as well as the Dakhni of South India. Because of Urdu's similarity to Hindi, speakers of the two languages can easily understand one another if both sides refrain from using literary vocabulary. Pakistan chose Urdu as its national language at the time of getting Independence from the British. Urdu is now the national language of Pakistan, spoken and understood thoroughly by majority of the population. Like all other languages, Urdu had to go through the stages of evolution. When British came to south Asia, Urdu had no hesitation in accepting the terms and words from English, as their counterpart was not there in Urdu because of difference of culture.
Many English words were used in their real form and some were changed according to the accent of Urdu. Urdu is still continuously passing through the process of evolution because of its flexibility. Perhaps this is the reason why Urdu has become the third most popular language of the world. The language of the court, and of literature, was usually Persian, while that of religion was Arabic, the language of the Qur'an. This process of the mingling of these languages and the local dialects led to the development of everyday speech that sounded much like today's Urdu and Hindi.
There is still a spectrum of dialects spoken in the streets of cities from Lahore and Karachi to Delhi and Calcutta and in the villages all over the region. The main difference is that Urdu is written with the Arabic script whereas Hindi is written in the script originally used for Sanskrit, Devanagari. Urdu has a lot more Persian and Arabic loanwords than Hindi, but these are almost exclusively used in formal speech and the two languages remain completely mutually intelligible. Today, Urdu is the main language of Pakistan and is perceived as a language spoken by Muslims, while Hindi is spoken mainly in India, and is the language spoken by Hindus and non-Muslims.
As spoken English is different from the litrary form, so is the language widely spoken in the Indian subcontinent . Of the two countries decided to take upon as a language - Urdu with nastaa'liq and Hindi with devnaagri scrip. Further, the respective govts emphasized using Arabic/Persian and Sanskrit respectively to include new terms in the language. But the people are much wiser, instead the use the commonly used words. For instance, scholars cannot deny the fact that the word - 'chaapal' (slipper/fip-flop) is a desi term and not something derived from Sanskrit,Arabic or Persian. Its neither 'shibshib' or 'paadukaa' , or anywhere near to them.
