Modern Standard Hindi, commonly referred to as Hindi, is the standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in Devanagari script. It is the official language of India alongside English and the lingua franca of North India. Hindi is considered a Sanskritised register of the Hindustani language, which itself is based primarily on the Khariboli dialect of Delhi and neighbouring areas. It is an official language in nine states and three union territories and an additional official language in three other states. Hindi is also one of the 22 scheduled languages of the Republic of India.
Urdu is a Persianised register of the Hindustani language, an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, where it is also an official language alongside English. In India, Urdu is an Eighth Schedule language, the status and cultural heritage of which are recognised by the Constitution of India; and it also has an official status in several Indian states. In Nepal, Urdu is a registered regional dialect and in South Africa, it is a protected language in the constitution. It is also spoken as a minority language in Afghanistan and Bangladesh, with no official status.
Hindustani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in North India and Pakistan, and functioning as the lingua franca of the region. It is also spoken by the Deccani people. Hindustani is a pluricentric language with two standard registers, known as Hindi and Urdu which serve as official languages of India and Pakistan, respectively. Thus, it is also called Hindi–Urdu. Colloquial registers of the language fall on a spectrum between these standards. In modern times, a third variety of Hindustani with significant English influences has also appeared which is sometimes called Hinglish or Urdish.
The Indo-Aryan languages are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European language family. As of the early 21st century, they have more than 800 million speakers, primarily concentrated east of the Indus river in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Nepal. Moreover, apart from the Indian subcontinent, large immigrant and expatriate Indo-Aryan–speaking communities live in Northwestern Europe, Western Asia, North America, the Caribbean, Southeast Africa, Polynesia and Australia, along with several million speakers of Romani languages primarily concentrated in Southeastern Europe. There are over 200 known Indo-Aryan languages.
Pakistan is a multilingual country with over 70 languages spoken as first languages. The majority of Pakistan's languages belong to the Indo-Iranian group of the Indo-European language family.
Deccani is an Indo-Aryan language based on a form of Hindustani spoken in the Deccan region of south-central India and is the native language of the Deccani people. The historical form of Deccani sparked the development of Urdu literature during the late-Mughal period. Deccani arose as a lingua franca under the Delhi and Bahmani Sultanates, as trade and migration from the north introduced Hindustani to the Deccan. It later developed a literary tradition under the patronage of the Deccan Sultanates. Deccani itself came to influence modern standard Urdu and later Hindi.
Hindūstān was a historical region, polity, and a name for India, historically used to refer to the northern Indian subcontinent later expanded to the entire subcontinent, used in the modern day to refer to the Republic of India. Being the Iranic cognate of the Indic word Sindhu, it originally referred to the land of lower Indus basin during the ancient era, but was later extended to refer to northern Indian subcontinent. It finally referred to the entire subcontinent since the early modern period. Since the Partition of India in 1947, Hindustan continues to be used to the present day as a historic name for the Republic of India.
Hindustani is one of the predominant languages of South Asia, with federal status in the republics of India and Pakistan in its standardized forms of Hindi and Urdu respectively. It is widely spoken and understood as a second language in Nepal, Bangladesh, and the Persian Gulf and as such is considered a lingua franca in the northern Indian subcontinent. It is also one of the most widely spoken languages in the world by total number of speakers. It developed in north India, principally during the Mughal Empire, when the Persian language exerted a strong influence on the Western Hindi languages of central India; this contact between the Hindu and Muslim cultures resulted in the core Indo-Aryan vocabulary of the Indian dialect of Hindi spoken in Delhi, whose earliest form is known as Old Hindi, being enriched with Persian loanwords. Rekhta, or "mixed" speech, which came to be known as Hindustani, Hindi, Hindavi, and Urdu, also locally known as Lashkari or Lashkari Zaban in long form, was thus created. This form was elevated to the status of a literary language, and after the partition of colonial India and independence this collection of dialects became the basis for modern standard Hindi and Urdu. Although these official languages are distinct registers with regards to their formal aspects, such as modern technical vocabulary, they continue to be all but indistinguishable in their vernacular form. From the colonial era onwards, Hindustani has also taken in many words from English, with an urban English-influenced variety emerging known as Hinglish.
Hindustani, also known as Hindi-Urdu, is the vernacular form of two standardized registers used as official languages in India and Pakistan, namely Hindi and Urdu. It comprises several closely related dialects in the northern, central and northwestern parts of the Indian subcontinent but is mainly based on Khariboli of the Delhi region. As an Indo-Aryan language, Hindustani has a core base that traces back to Sanskrit but as a widely-spoken lingua franca, it has a large lexicon of loanwords, acquired through centuries of foreign rule and ethnic diversity.
The Hindi–Urdu controversy arose in 19th century colonial India out of the debate over whether Modern Standard Hindi or Standard Urdu should be chosen as a national language.
Caribbean Hindustani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by Indo-Caribbean people and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. It is a koiné language mainly based on the Bhojpuri and Awadhi dialects. These Hindustani dialects were the most spoken dialects by the Indians who came as immigrants to the Caribbean from Colonial India as indentured laborers. It is closely related to Fiji Hindi and the Bhojpuri-Hindustani spoken in Mauritius and South Africa.
The Urdu Defence Association was an organisation developed by Mohsin-ul-Mulk, starting in 1900, for the advocacy of Urdu as the lingua franca of the Muslim community of India. The association is regarded as an offshoot of the Aligarh Movement.
The Urdu movement was a socio-political movement aimed at making Urdu, as the universal lingua-franca and symbol of the cultural and political identity of the Muslim communities of the Indian subcontinent during the British Raj. The movement began with the fall of the Mughal Empire in the mid-19th century, fuelled by the Aligarh movement of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. It strongly influenced the All India Muslim League and the Pakistan movement.
Tatsama are Sanskrit loanwords in modern Indo-Aryan languages like Assamese, Bengali, Marathi, Nepali, Odia, Hindi, Gujarati, and Sinhala and in Dravidian languages like Tamil, Kannada and Telugu. They generally belong to a higher and more erudite register than common words, many of which are directly inherited from Old Indo-Aryan (tadbhava). The tatsama register can be compared to the use of loan words of Greek or Latin origin in English.
South Asia is home to several hundred languages, spanning the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It is home to the fourth most spoken language in the world, Hindi–Urdu; and the sixth most spoken language, Bengali. Languages like Bengali, Tamil and Nepali have official/national status in more than one country of this region. The languages in the region mostly comprise Indo-Iranic and Dravidian languages, and further members of other language families like Austroasiatic, and Tibeto-Burman languages.
Before British colonisation, the Persian language was the lingua franca of the Indian subcontinent and a widely used official language in North India. The language was brought into South Asia by various Turkics and Afghans and was preserved and patronized by Local Indian dynasties from the 11th century onwards, notable of which were the Ghaznavids, Sayyid Dynasty, Tughlaq dynasty, Khilji dynasty, Mughal Dynasty, Gujarat Sultanate, Bengal sultanate etc. Initially it was used by Muslim dynasties of India but later started being used by Non-Muslim empires too, For example the Sikh empire, Persian held official status in the court and the administration within these empires. It largely replaced Sanskrit as the language of politics, literature, education, and social status in the subcontinent.
Hindustani, also known as Hindi-Urdu, like all Indo-Aryan languages, has a core base of Sanskrit-derived vocabulary, which it gained through Prakrit. As such the standardized registers of the Hindustani language (Hindi-Urdu) share a common vocabulary, especially on the colloquial level. However, in formal contexts, Modern Standard Hindi tends to draw on Sanskrit, while Standard Urdu turns to Persian and sometimes Arabic. This difference lies in the history of Hindustani, in which the lingua franca started to gain more Persian words in urban areas, under the Delhi Sultanate; this dialect came to be termed Urdu.
Syed Ahmad Dehlvi was an Indian Muslim scholar, linguist, lexicographer, philologist, educationist and an author of Urdu language. He compiled the Asifiya dictionary.
Hindi–Urdu is the lingua franca of modern-day Northern India and Pakistan. Modern Standard Hindi is officially registered in India as a standard written using the Devanagari script, and Standard Urdu is officially registered in Pakistan as a standard written using an extended Perso-Arabic script.
Sanskritisation is the process of introducing features from Sanskrit, such as vocabulary and grammar, into other languages. It is sometimes associated with the "Hinduisation" of a linguistic community, or less commonly, with introducing a more upper-caste status into a community. Many languages throughout South Asia and Southeast Asia were greatly influenced by Sanskrit historically.
