Personal anecdote: when I first went to South Asia, I spent time in southern Pakistan and learned some basic Urdu. Then I spent time in north India, among Hindi speakers. The language I'd learned was immediately usable there, but my local friends could also tell where it came from -- and sometimes would tell me "Aha! yes, we know what you mean, but that's an Urdu word - in Hindi we say ...."
So even on a basic street level, I don't think it's true that they're identical. Both part of the same huge dialect continuum, yes, but they're slightly different points on it.
Whether to call them separate languages is as much a political question as a linguistic one, of course.
A video from one of my favourite Youtube channels explains it in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxSd7p1i_TA
That said, I've personally seen this as a common occurrence among people who didn't study any other languages other than Hindi or didn't study any at all.
You will only find someone like a Hindi teacher or a priest using a word like "avashya" when they're trying to signal that they are educated and thus speaking in the 'pure' register. In the natural language of Hindi, the word used is 'zaroor'. Using 'avashya' is speaking a conlang, pretty much.
Just because zaroor is commonly used doesn't make it Hindi.
By this reasoning Urdu is the most widely spoken language of India.
'Nishchit' doesn't even by itself replace 'zaroor'. 'Nishchit' means certain or definite. To replace 'zaroor' (certainly or definitely) you would actually have to say 'nishchit roop se'.
Hindi-speaking people absolutely use 'zaroor' and 'bilkul' instead of 'nishchit roop se' when they're actually speaking Hindi, instead of self-consciously speaking Sanskritised Hindi in a formal register -- and this is always in the context of a specific political alignment.
Exactly! Couldn't have worded it better.
It is closer to "Certainly"
'Avashya' is again a word you wouldn't be able to use in colloquial speech without coming across as eccentric. It means the same thing as 'zaroor' but it's like saying "I am desirous of x" instead of "I want x".
You can find examples of the use of "avashya" in the movies of Hrishikesh Mukherjee (like Golmaal and Chupke-Chupke) in which off-beat characters who made a special point of speaking the purest Hindi as part of their characters' eccentricity used "avashya" and other words like it, while the other characters who spoke normal Hindi didn't.
We similarly use several words from Latin, French and other languages in colloquial English, but from pure language standpoint I doubt that they'd be called English words.
Edit: A Wikipedia page of interest [0]
All of them are of foreign origin.
Me personally, yes I would. A linguist, I can't say, would perhaps depend on each word and when they became part of the language.
Hindi is obviously derived from Sanskrit and other languages. However, Hindi and Urdu are quiet different. Give a word and in most cases most people will be able to tell if it's a Hindi word or an Urdu word.
Linguistically there is no difference between Hindi and Urdu. The primary criterion is grammatical structure which is identical in Hindi and Urdu. Writing systems and choice of nouns don't matter either.
Hindi is not obviously derived from Sanskrit. Can a Hindi speaker follow Sanskrit easily or is Punjabi easier? Urdu/Hindi are indirectly derived from Sanskrit and both of them have the same connection to Sanskrit.
The so called pure Hindi/Urdu is a language noone speaks. The artificial text book Hindi which noone speaks was constructed 100 years ago by replacing Persian loanwords with Sanskrit words and writing suitable Sanskrit based dictionaries.
If you are certain that pure Hindi is a thing, please tell us what percentage of Hindi speaking population uses nischit in place of zaroor and why is this minority Hindi pure.
As a side note, language relationships are not dictated by loan words. Otherwise south Indian languages would be considered indo-aryan rather than dravidian. In fact, some south Indian languages use more Sanskrit based words than Hindi.
The only difference between hindi and Urdu is political.
Appendix: list of loanwords from Persian in Hindi, for which nobody uses Sanskrit based equivalents in real life.
Saaya, hamesha, pareshaan, Khushi, sabzi, mehrban, deewar, taaza, darwaaza.
Maybe there is some dude somewhere who uses pratidin instead of Roz - I have never met this mythical creature. Just like using a word like "light* in a Hindi sentence doesn't change the language, neither does using Persian loanwords.
Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit the incivilities out of your comments here in the future? We'd appreciate it.
Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and edit the incivilities out of your comments here in the future? We'd appreciate it.
For what it's worth, मुजरिम is also Urdu. Not sure about आरोप, but I have a feeling that it's also Urdu, though I could be wrong.
Edit: read any Hindi newspaper these days, at least the online edition, and in fact you will find a lot of common Hindi/Urdu words being replaced with English words written in Devnagri.
Moreover, there are hundreds of dialects of Hindi spoken in India, each with its own nuances and varying degrees of Urdu words.
In addition, there is no denying that Urdu and Hindi have some shared lineage.
Again will refer to the Wikipedia [0] for better coverage of this topic
Yes there were cultural/academic differences and many different dialects of Hindi. Kabir sounds very different from Ghalib. But for the man on the street there was no difference. At most, you can argue that Urdu is the most popular dialect of Hindi. It wouldn't be correct, but less wrong.
Hyderabadi and Tamil Muslims speak a dialect of Hindi that they call urdu that would make Ghalib spin in his grave.
Differences within Urdu/Hindi are far more tremendous than the Hindi Urdu split. Calling them separate languages is crazy.
It's a cultural standard. Muslims call their language Urdu. Hindus call it Hindi. The language is the same, whatever you call it.
If you want to make your argument rigorous please give an estimate of pure textbook Hindi speakers (people who use avashya instead of zaroor, hriday instead of Dil outside academics and newspapers) and "hindustani" speakers.
My conservative estimate is less than 10M for "pure Hindi" and greater than 300M for regular hindi/Urdu.
This is because virtually every one from North India and Pakistan speaks the so called Hindi/Urdu mixed language. I have also met bhojpuri, awadhi, marwari speakers but I am yet to meet the mythical pure Hindi speaker and I am a really old guy.
What else makes a language? Syntax? Hindi and Urdu have almost identical syntax. There are more syntactical differences between Hindi and Punjabi than there are between Hindi and Urdu.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%9A%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%AD%E...
Likewise, निश्चित certainly isn't Hindi in this narrow sense. It's a direct borrowing from Sanskrit, not a native, inherited word of the language.
And Hindi (हिन्दी) itself isn't a Hindi word; it's Persian (likewise Hindu).
If we discount direct borrowings from Sanskrit, I guess there would be very little left. Something like Pali, essentially.
So 'fire' in Hindi(/Urdu) is āg (आग), but 'fire' in Sanskrit is agni (अग्नि), which has also been borrowed into Hindi (as the name of the god of fire; or fire in ritual contexts). Now, āg descends from agni, but represents the natural linguistic development into Hindi.
Fire in Pali is 'aggi'. Seems a plausible link between 'agni' and 'aag'.
But you suggested there would be very little left. Yet the core of both Hindi & Urdu is (unsurprisingly) inherited from Vulgar Sanskrit>(some sort of) Prakrit>Apabhramśa>... , so it's rather a lot of vocabulary that's there.
(1) Christopher Shackle & Rupert Snell. 1990. Hindi and Urdu since 1800: a common reader. New Delhi: Heritage Publishers.
[which is actually now freely available online at https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/46072 (had I known, I would have linked it earlier/higher in the thread, since it's very relevant) its bibliography is also good for further reading]
For the earlier development of modern Indo-Aryan languages from Sanskrit:
(2) Jules Bloch (ed. & translated by A. Master). 1965. Indo-Aryan from the Vedas to modern times. Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve.
For a good general overall (including history and other things) to Indo-Aryan languages:
(3) Colin P. Masica. 1991. The Indo-Aryan languages. Cambridge: CUP.
In Hindi (modelled on S.K. Chatterjee's The Origin & Development of the Bengali language [written in English!]):
(4) Tiwari, U.N. 1961. हिंदी भाषा का उद्गम और विकास [hindī bhāṣā kā udgam aur vikās]. Prayag, Allahabad: Bharati Bhandar.
Another great (free, online) reference is the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia (including non-Indo-Aryan languages of India as well) at: https://dsal.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/ (perhaps esp. including Turner's A comprehensive dictionary of Indo-Aryan languages: https://dsalsrv04.uchicago.edu/dictionaries/soas/ ).
[Some of the other references can be found 'freely' online in pdf form in the usual 'dark' corners.]
(For a trivial example, is اس the word /ɪs/ "this" or /ʊs/ "that"? In Devanagari, they're clearly different, इस vs उस. Urdu script can distinguish them, by adding a diacritic to the ا, but it's usually omitted, leaving the reader to infer the intended word from context. For a native speaker, that's not usually a problem, but for a learner it can be an added challenge.)
On the other hand, I suspect the Urdu script might be faster for an experienced writer to use, as there's a beautiful simplicity and smoothness to its cursive forms, compared to the relatively complex shapes of many Devanagari letters.
Another issue is the allophony of the schwas surrounding ह (/h/) in words like कहना which is actually pronounced [kɛɦɛnaː] and not [kəɦ(ə)naː]. (note that this is also an instance of the schwa deletion)
Not in my experience and certainly not as a student. I'm not an expert but at my school اس for something that sounds exactly as /ɪs/ would be considered completely invalid. Only اِس would be considered correct. Actually, I think اِز (more like iz) might be more correct phonetically.
The same goes for my New York English in the South. As long as one speaker is cognisable to the other, the default assumption should be dialect, creole or pidgin, not separate languages.
You can perhaps argue Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are different dialects of the same language, or say the same for Portuguese and Galician but most linguists, Nordic and Iberian people will be offended by such a notion.
If you speak Italian to a Spanish person, they might be able to understand quite a lot but they'll know that you are speaking Italian. This is not always the case with Hindi and Urdu.
I also doubt they understand any Romanian at all.
> A statistical analysis sorting Romanian words by etymological source carried out by Macrea (1961)[88] based on the DLRM[99] (49,649 words) showed the following makeup:[89]
> 43% recent Romance loans (mainly French: 38.42%, Latin: 2.39%, Italian: 1.72%) 20% inherited Latin 11.5% Slavic (Old Church Slavonic: 7.98%, Bulgarian: 1.78%, Bulgarian-Serbian: 1.51%) 8.31% Unknown/unclear origin 3.62% Turkish 2.40% Modern Greek 2.17% Hungarian 1.77% German (including Austrian High German)[97] 2.24% Onomatopoeic If the analysis is restricted to a core vocabulary of 2,500 frequent, semantically rich and productive words, then the Latin inheritance comes first, followed by Romance and classical Latin neologisms, whereas the Slavic borrowings come third.
It's often a mix and the fact that it's understandable to you so long as you speak one Indian language should not surprise you. One thing Indians do subconsciously is adapt to using a mix of words and grammatical structure understandable to the group they are speaking to, for example when speaking to a well educated person who understands Hindi and English, I will frequently speak neither but rather Hinglish, mixing idioms and words from both languages in the same sentence, choosing words and idioms that most closely convey my thought. If I'm speaking to someone who also speaks Punjabi, I'll frequently throw in some Punjabi as well.
None of this is done consciously.
Also note that there are dialects even of Hindi. If you record Hindi spoken by someone from Bihar when speaking to someone else who also understands that dialect natively and only understands Hindi at the speed it's spoken may take someone from Punjab who also speaks Hindi some amount of focus to understand. However if you throw the person from Punjab into the mix of people speaking, the dialect and accent will adjust.
This is something Indians never actually consciously realize they are doing. I only figured it out because I now have kids who we are raising in New York and teaching Hindi to and they haven't learned natively how to switch like that like kids growing up in India have.
I've thought about this a bit and now think learning multiple "human" languages, ideally fairly different ones, should be absolutely required of everyone. Much like programming languages, there are certain thoughts you really can't think effectively in certain languages.
This is called "code switching", a universal human phenomenon (not just in India) which I find extremely fascinating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
I have personally observed it happening between Spanish and English in ethnically Mexican communities in the Southwestern US, and ethnically Puerto Rican and Dominican communities in New York. Also between French and English on the streets of Montreal.
> Also note that there are dialects even of Hindi. If you record Hindi spoken by someone from Bihar when speaking to someone else who also understands that dialect natively and only understands Hindi at the speed it's spoken may take someone from Punjab who also speaks Hindi some amount of focus to understand. However if you throw the person from Punjab into the mix of people speaking, the dialect and accent will adjust.
This is true even in English, which is often considered (incorrectly) "not to have any dialects".
I'm a native American English speaker, and I would have quite a bit of difficulty understanding a recording of a conversation between two people from rural Scotland or Northern England.
But me and someone from those places would be able to communicate face-to-face just fine, slowing things down a bit and avoiding slang.
To some extent this is true of all languages, and it's a big part of nation building to draw the lines in whatever ways are convenient. Like, who decided Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian are all separate languages but Swiss, Quebecois, Alsatian, West African, and French versions of French are all the same? Where are we drawing lines if not at political boundaries?
According to Hobsbawn, the original sources of developing national identity came from newspapers. Once the printing press became a thing, over time, whatever language a region read its news in slowly became the way for natural cultural divisions to form. The presence of news and a common literary canon created an imagined community around it.
India didn't have nationalism form this way since British administrative districts cut across linguistic/cultural lines. They muddied the natural process of nation-formation by having everyone speak English as a lingua franca and relegating the native languages to private life. But the Islam/Hindu cleavage was still there, so that's where the division came in at independence. (Among other cleavages that the early government of India managed to keep under control).
Very true. An even clearer example is Catalan and Occitan, which are just the two most famous/prestigious/standardized poles in a still clearly-existing dialect continuum.
Or Scots and English: polls suggest that people's answers to the questions "is Scots a separate language, or a dialect of English?" and "should Scotland be an independent country?" are strongly correlated. On the surface, it seems that the former is a scientific question and the latter is a political one, so they shouldn't be correlated at all, but in reality they are both political questions.
Other examples include the various Chinese varieties (Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hokkien, etc. etc.), which are often considered one language for political reasons, Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian, which are nearly identical but often considered different languages for political reasons (imagine if we considered US American to be a different language from Canadian), Romanian and Moldovan to which the same description applies, and so on. There are examples practically everywhere you look.
Indeed, a large percentage of 'Hindi dialects' are nothing of the sort. Many Rajasthani 'dialects' are far closer to Gujarati than they are to Hindi.
That is a common misconception. You are confusing colloquial Hindi and colloquial Urdu with the pure Hindi and pure Urdu.
Pick a word, any word and there is Hindi equivalent and there is a Urdu equivalent. Just because the spoken Hindi, primarily in India, uses a mixture doesn't make them same or even similar.
For linguists, the colloquial language is the most important aspect of a language, and it's actually very reasonable for that.
First, most languages do not have a written form, and for those that do, most could not communicate in writing until very recently.
Second, until very recently, most people could not communicate in anything but their colloquial form, and even then, most communication is colloquial form.
Finally, linguists are primarily concerned with analyzing what makes a language a language (vs. not a language) rather than what makes a language a language (vs. another language). For this reason it makes sense to consider only the colloquial language, since everyone who participates in a language to communicate and not for ideological reasons participates in the colloquial language, but the same cannot be said for "standard language".
Let's just agree to disagree and move on.
For any non-Indian person reading this, please note that this statement is 100% false. I am an outsider to Hindi speaking and Urdu speaking region. I have no dog in any political fight here but I have studied Hindi all my academic life and can assuredly tell you this statement is utter rubbish.
But this might not be a fault of OP. A lot of people have this feeling because of Bollywood. Both Bollywood and Hindustani music is a cross of both Hindi and Urdu. If you never study Hindi or Urdu but watch a lot of Bollywood movies you will end up learning a bit of both the languages. But that does not mean they are same.
Which part of India wouldn't you say
"Zara kitaab dena"
Instead of text book artificial
"Kripaya pustak Dena"
That is untrue I have a master degree in Hindi. Bollywood Hindi is not Hindi in any sense. For example it does not match to a Navbharat Times to typical classic of Hindi literature.
> Which part of India wouldn't you say > "Zara kitaab dena"
Essentially everywhere from railway signs to classrooms to essays and everywhere. Bollywood is heavily influenced by Urdu but in general Hindi speaking heartland of UP one would perfectly ignore the Urdu influence.
These are official government sanctioned institutions practicing text book Hindi. I have used it in classrooms too. This language is never used in the streets. Differing choice of nouns perfectly intelligible to each other doesn't even constitute a different dialect, much less a different language. There are cultural and scriptural differences and an effort to use more Sanskrit words in Hindi literature starting 150 years ago and an effort to use Persian words by Mughal courtiers words going back even further. I know several people from the Hindi heartland and absolutely noone uses pustak in place of kitaab or ullas in place of khushi, unless they want to be laughed at. That language belongs to classrooms, dramas and to a lesser extent Hindi literature. Just listen to this interview of mayawati.
She uses awaaz, nafrat and afsos as well as English words and claims to be speaking Hindi. Is she wrong? Is she not from the heartland? Is she actually speaking Urdu? If you use these words like of Dil instead of hriday in an academic exam you will lose points, but that is an exercise in linguistic politics that any true student of language has no time for.
I understand that Hindi and Urdu are taught as distinct languages in India and there is an ongoing effort to bifurcate the nouns used in both systems but this effort has been largely unsuccessful amongst actual speakers of Hindi. They have succeeded with news anchors, plays, newspapers etc. But not anywhere else.
Hindi and Urdu, by any reasonable linguistic definition are not separate languages. The official standards for both Hindi and Urdu, are both based on the form of the huge dialect continuum that spans North India and Pakistan, as spoken in Delhi. The only difference is that Urdu uses Persian and Arabic as inspiration/source for high vocabulary, whereas Hindi uses Sanskrit as a source for high vocabulary. And they use different scripts. But on the street level, the language is identical, not merely mutually intelligible.
Many of the languages traditionally clubbed by the Indian government as Hindi are much farther away from standard Hindi than Urdu.