Hindustani language
Hindustani is the lingua franca of Northern India and Pakistan; known in its literary forms as Hindi–Urdu and historically as Hindui, Hindavi, and later as Rekhta, Dehlavi, Hindi, and Urdu. It is an Indo-Aryan language, deriving its base primarily from the Western Hindi dialect of Delhi, also known as Khariboli. Hindustani is a pluricentric language, with two standardised registers, Modern Standard Hindi and Modern Standard Urdu.
The concept of a Hindustani language as a "unifying language" or "fusion language" was endorsed by Mahatma Gandhi.
The language's first written poetry, in the form of Old Hindi, can be traced to as early as 769 AD. During the period of Delhi Sultanate in India which resulted in the contact of Hindu and Muslim cultures, the Prakrit base of Old Hindi became enriched with loanwords from Persian, evolving into the present form of Hindustani. The Hindustani vernacular became an expression of Indian national unity during the Indian Independence movement, and continues to be spoken as the common language of the people of the northern Indian subcontinent, which is reflected in the Hindustani vocabulary of Bollywood films and songs.
The language's core vocabulary is derived from Prakrit, with substantial loanwords from Persian and Arabic. The number of speakers can only be estimated. Ethnologue reports that, as of 2019, Hindi and Urdu together constitute the 3rd-most-spoken language in the world after English and Mandarin, with 785 million native and second-language speakers, though this includes millions who self-reported their language as 'Hindi' on the Indian census but speak a number of other Hindi languages than Hindustani. The total number of Hindi–Urdu speakers was reported to be over 300 million in 1995, making Hindustani the third- or fourth-most spoken language in the world.
History
Early forms of present-day Hindustani developed from the Middle Indo-Aryan apabhraṃśa vernaculars of present-day North India in the 7th–13th centuries, chiefly the Dehlavi dialect of the Western Hindi category of Indo-Aryan languages that is known as Old Hindi. Amir Khusrow, who lived in the thirteenth century during the Delhi Sultanate period in North India, used these forms in his writings and referred to it as Hindavi. The Delhi Sultanate, which comprised several Turkic and Afghan dynasties that ruled much of the subcontinent from Delhi, was succeeded by the Mughal Empire in 1526.Although the Mughals were of Timurid Turco-Mongol descent, they were Persianised, and Persian had gradually become the state language of the Mughal empire after Babur, a continuation since the introduction of Persian by Central Asian Turkic rulers in the Indian Subcontinent, and the patronisation of it by the earlier Turko-Afghan Delhi Sultanate. The basis in general for the introduction of Persian into the subcontinent was set, from its earliest days, by various Persianised Central Asian Turkic and Afghan dynasties.
Hindustani began to take shape as a Persianised vernacular during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire in South Asia. Hindustani retained the grammar and core vocabulary of the local Delhi dialect. However, as an emerging common dialect, Hindustani absorbed large numbers of Persian, Arabic, and Turkic loanwords, and as Mughal conquests grew it spread as a lingua franca across much of northern India; this was a result of the contact of Hindu and Muslim cultures in Hindustan that created a composite Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. The language was also known as Rekhta, or 'mixed', which implies that it was mixed with Persian. Written in the Perso-Arabic, Devanagari, and occasionally Kaithi or Gurmukhi scripts, it remained the primary lingua franca of northern India for the next four centuries, although it varied significantly in vocabulary depending on the local language. Alongside Persian, it achieved the status of a literary language in Muslim courts and was also used for literary purposes in various other settings such as Sufi, Nirgun sant, Krishna Bhakta circles, and Rajput Hindu courts. Its majors centers of development included the Mughal courts of Delhi, Lucknow, and Agra, and the Rajput courts of Amber and Jaipur.
In the 18th century, towards the end of the Mughal period, with the fragmentation of the empire and the elite system, a variant of Hindustani, one of the successors of apabhraṃśa vernaculars at Delhi, and nearby cities, came to gradually replace Persian as the lingua franca among the educated elite upper class particularly in northern India, though Persian still retained much of its pre-eminence for a short period. The term Hindustani was given to that language. The Perso-Arabic script form of this language underwent a standardization process and further Persianization during this period and came to be known as Urdu, a name derived from Persian: Zabān-e Urdū-e Mualla or Zabān-e Urdū. The etymology of the word Urdu is of Chagatai origin, Ordū, cognate with English , and known in local translation as Lashkari Zabān, which is shorted to Lashkari. This is all due to its origin as the common speech of the Mughal army. As a literary language, Urdu took shape in courtly, elite settings. Along with English, it became the first official language of British India in 1850.
Hindi as a standardized literary register of the Delhi dialect arose in the 19th century; the Braj dialect was the dominant literary language in the Devanagari script up until and through the 19th century. Efforts to promote a Devanagari version of the Delhi dialect under the name of Hindi gained pace around 1880 as an effort to displace Urdu's official position.
John Fletcher Hurst in his book published in 1891 mentioned that the Hindustani or camp language of the Mughal Empire's courts at Delhi was not regarded by philologists as a distinct language but only as a dialect of Hindi with admixture of Persian. He continued: "But it has all the magnitude and importance of separate language. It is linguistic result of Muslim rule of eleventh & twelfth centuries and is spoken by many Hindus in North India and by Musalman population in all parts of India." Next to English it was the official language of British Raj, was commonly written in Arabic or Persian characters, and was spoken by approximately 100,000,000 people.
When the British colonised the Indian subcontinent from the late 18th through to the late 19th century, they used the words 'Hindustani', 'Hindi', and 'Urdu' interchangeably. They developed it as the language of administration of British India, further preparing it to be the official language of modern India and Pakistan. However, with independence, use of the word 'Hindustani' declined, being largely replaced by 'Hindi' and 'Urdu', or 'Hindi-Urdu' when either of those was too specific. More recently, the word 'Hindustani' has been used for the colloquial language of Bollywood films, which are popular in both India and Pakistan and which cannot be unambiguously identified as either Hindi or Urdu.
Registers
Although, at the spoken level, Hindi and Urdu are considered registers of a single language, Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu, as they share a common grammar and core vocabulary, they differ in literary and formal vocabulary; where literary Hindi draws heavily on Sanskrit and to a lesser extent Prakrit, literary Urdu draws heavily on Persian and Arabic loanwords. The grammar and base vocabulary of both Hindi and Urdu, however, are the same and derive from a Prakritic base, and both have Persian/Arabic influence.The standardised registers Hindi and Urdu are collectively known as Hindi-Urdu. Hindustani is perhaps the lingua franca of the north and west of the Indian subcontinent, though it is understood fairly well in other regions also, especially in the urban areas. A common vernacular sharing characteristics with Sanskritised Hindi, regional Hindi and Urdu, Hindustani is more commonly used as a vernacular than highly Sanskritised Hindi or highly Persianised Urdu.
This can be seen in the popular culture of Bollywood or, more generally, the vernacular of North Indians and Pakistanis, which generally employs a lexicon common to both Hindi and Urdu speakers. Minor subtleties in region will also affect the 'brand' of Hindustani, sometimes pushing the Hindustani closer to Urdu or to Hindi. One might reasonably assume that the Hindustani spoken in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh and Varanasi is somewhat different.
Modern Standard Hindi
Standard Hindi, one of the 22 officially recognised languages of India and the official language of the Union, is usually written in the indigenous Devanagari script of India and exhibits less Persian and Arabic influence than Urdu. It has a literature of 500 years, with prose, poetry, religion and philosophy. One could conceive of a wide spectrum of dialects and registers, with the highly Persianised Urdu at one end of the spectrum and a heavily Sanskritized variety spoken in the region around Varanasi, at the other end. In common usage in India, the term Hindi includes all these dialects except those at the Urdu spectrum. Thus, the different meanings of the word Hindi include, among others:- standardised Hindi as taught in schools throughout India,
- formal or official Hindi advocated by Purushottam Das Tandon and as instituted by the post-independence Indian government, heavily influenced by Sanskrit,
- the vernacular dialects of Hindustani as spoken throughout India,
- the neutralised form of Hindustani used in popular television and films, or
- the more formal neutralised form of Hindustani used in television and print news reports.
Modern Standard Urdu
It is written, except in some parts of India, in the Persian Nastaliq script using the Urdu alphabet, an extended Perso-Arabic script incorporating Indic phonemes. It is heavily influenced by Persian vocabulary and was historically also known as Rekhta.
As Dakhini where it also draws words from local languages, it survives and enjoys a rich history in the Deccan and other parts of South India, with the prestige dialect being Hyderabadi Urdu spoken in and around the capital of the Nizams and the Deccan Sultanates.
Earliest forms of the language's literature may be traced back to the 13th-14th century works of Amīr Khusrau Dehlavī, often called the "father of Urdu literature" while Walī Deccani is seen as the progenitor of Urdu poetry.
Bazaar Hindustani
In a specific sense, Hindustani may refer to the dialects and varieties used in common speech or slang, in contrast with the standardised Hindi and Urdu. This meaning is reflected in the use of the term bazaar Hindustani, in other words, the 'street talk' or literally 'marketplace Hindustani', as opposed to the perceived refinement of formal Hindi/Urdu, or even Sanskrit.Names
ca. 1300 referred to this language of his writings as Dehlavi or Hindavi. During this period, Hindustani was used by Sufis in promulgating their message across the Indian subcontinent. After the advent of the Mughals in the subcontinent, Hindustani acquired more Persian loanwords. Rekhta and Hindi became popular names for the same language until the 18th century.The name Urdu appeared around 1780. It is believed to have been coined by the poet Mashafi. Prior to this, the language had a larger variety of names such as Hindustani, Hindvi, Lahori, Dakni and Rekhta and also commonly known as the Zaban-i-Ordu, from which he derived the name Urdu. In local literature and speech, it was also known as the Lashkari Zaban or Lashkari. Mashafi was the first person to simply modify the name Zaban-i-Ordu to Urdu.
During the British Raj, the term Hindustani was used by British officials. In 1796, John Borthwick Gilchrist published a "A Grammar of the Hindoostanee Language". Upon partition, India and Pakistan established national standards that they called Hindi and Urdu, respectively, and attempted to make distinct, with the result that Hindustani commonly, but mistakenly, came to be seen as a "mixture" of Hindi and Urdu.
Grierson, in his highly influential Linguistic Survey of India, proposed that the names Hindustani, Urdu, and Hindi be separated in use for different varieties of the Hindustani language, rather than as the overlapping synonyms they frequently were:
Literature
Official status
Hindi and Urdu, are major standardised register of Hindustani, Hindi is declared by Article 343, Part 17 of the Indian Constitution as the "official language of the Union." At the same time, however, the definitive text of federal laws is officially the English text and proceedings in the higher appellate courts must be conducted in English.At the state level, Hindi is one of the official languages in 10 of the 29 Indian states and three Union Territories, respectively: Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal; Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Delhi.
In the remaining states, Hindi is not an official language. In states like Tamil Nadu and Karnataka, studying Hindi is not compulsory in the state curriculum. However, an option to take the same as second or third language does exist. In many other states, studying Hindi is usually compulsory in the school curriculum as a third language, though the intensiveness of Hindi in the curriculum varies. Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, where it shares official language status with English. Although English is spoken by many, and Punjabi is the native language of the majority of the population, Urdu is the lingua franca. Urdu is also one of the languages recognised in the Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India and is an official language of the Indian states of Bihar, Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. Although the government school system in most other states emphasises Modern Standard Hindi, at universities in cities such as Lucknow, Aligarh and Hyderabad, Urdu is spoken and learnt, and Saaf or Khaalis Urdu is treated with just as much respect as Shuddha Hindi.
Hindustani was the official language of the British Raj and was synonymous with both Hindi and Urdu. After India's independence in 1947, the Sub-Committee on Fundamental Rights recommended that the official language of India be Hindustani: "Hindustani, written either in Devanagari or the Perso-Arabic script at the option of the citizen, shall, as the national language, be the first official language of the Union." However, this recommendation was not adopted by the Constituent Assembly.
Geographical distribution
Besides being the lingua franca of North India and Pakistan in South Asia, Hindustani is also spoken by many in the South Asian diaspora and their descendants around the world, including North America, Europe, and the Middle East.- A sizeable population in Afghanistan, especially in Kabul, can also speak and understand Hindi-Urdu due to the popularity and influence of Bollywood films and songs in the region, as well as the fact that many Afghan refugees spent time in Pakistan in the 1980s and 1990s.
- Fiji Hindi was derived from the Hindustani linguistic group and is spoken widely by Fijians of Indian origin.
- Hindustani was also one of the languages that was spoken widely during British rule in Burma. Many older citizens of Myanmar, particularly Anglo-Indians and the Anglo-Burmese, still know it, although it has had no official status in the country since military rule began.
- Hindustani is also spoken in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, where migrant workers from various countries live and work for several years.
Phonology
Grammar
Vocabulary
Hindi-Urdu's core vocabulary has an Indic base, being derived from Prakrit, which in turn derives from Sanskrit, as well as a substantial amount of loanwords from Persian and Arabic. Hindustani contains around 5,500 words of Persian and Arabic origin.Writing system
Historically, Hindustani was written in the Kaithi, Devanagari, and Urdu alphabets. Kaithi and Devanagari are two of the Brahmic scripts native to India, whereas Urdu is a derivation of the Persian Nastaʿlīq script, which is the preferred calligraphic style for Urdu.Today, Hindustani continues to be written in the nastaliq alphabet in Pakistan. In India, the Hindi register is officially written in Devanagari, and Urdu in the nastaliq alphabet, to the extent that these standards are partly defined by their script.
However, in popular publications in India, Urdu is also written in Devanagari, with slight variations to establish a Devanagari Urdu alphabet alongside the Devanagari Hindi alphabet.
| Letter | Name of letter | Transcription | IPA |
| alif | – | – | |
| be | b | ||
| pe | p | ||
| te | t | ||
| ṭe | ṭ | ||
| se | s | ||
| jīm | j | ||
| che | ch | ||
| baṛī he | h | / ~ / | |
| khe | k͟h | ||
| dāl | d | ||
| ḍāl | ḍ | ||
| zāl | z | ||
| re | r | / ~ / | |
| ṛe | ṛ | ||
| ze | z | ||
| zhe | zh | ||
| sīn | s | ||
| shīn | sh | ||
| su'ād | s | ||
| zu'ād | z | ||
| to'e | t | ||
| zo'e | z | ||
| ‘ain | a | – | |
| ghain | ġ | ||
| fe | f | ||
| qāf | q | ||
| kāf | k | ||
| gāf | g | ||
| lām | l | ||
| mīm | m | ||
| nūn | n | ||
| nūn ghunna | ṇ | ||
| vā'o | v, o, or ū | ,, or | |
| choṭī he | h | / ~ / | |
| do chashmī he | h | or | |
| hamza | ' | ||
| ye | y, i | or | |
| baṛī ye | ai or e | , or |
Because of anglicisation in South Asia and the international use of the Latin script, Hindustani is occasionally written in the Latin script. This adaptation is called Roman Urdu or Romanised Hindi, depending upon the register used. Because the Bollywood film industry is a major proponent of the Latin script, the use of Latin script to write in Hindi and Urdu is growing amongst younger Internet users. Since Urdu and Hindi are mutually intelligible when spoken, Romanised Hindi and Roman Urdu are mostly mutually intelligible as well.
Sample text
Colloquial Hindustani
An example of colloquial Hindustani::- Devanagari: यह कितने का है?
- Nastaliq:
- Romanization: Yeh kitné ka hai?
- English: How much is it?
Literary Hindi
अनुच्छेद १ — सभी मनुष्यों को गौरव और अधिकारों के विषय में जन्मजात स्वतन्त्रता प्राप्त हैं। उन्हें बुद्धि और अन्तरात्मा की देन प्राप्त है और परस्पर उन्हें भाईचारे के भाव से बर्ताव करना चाहिये।| Nastaliq transcription |
| Transliteration |
| Anucched 1: Sabhī manushyoṇ ko gaurav aur adhikāroṇ ke vishay meṇ janm'jāt svatantratā prāpt haiṇ. Unheṇ buddhi aur antarātmā kī den prāpt hai aur paraspar unheṇ bhāīchāre ke bhāv se bartāv karnā chāhiye. |
| Transcription |
| Gloss |
| Article 1—All human-beings to dignity and rights' matter in from-birth freedom acquired is. Them to reason and conscience's endowment acquired is and always them to brotherhood's spirit with behaviour to do should. |
| Translation |
| Article 1—All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. |
Literary Urdu
| Devanagari transcription |
| दफ़ा १ — तमाम इनसान आज़ाद और हुक़ूक़ ओ इज़्ज़त के ऐतबार से बराबर पैदा हुए हैं। इन्हें ज़मीर और अक़्ल वदीयत हुई हैं। इसलिए इन्हें एक दूसरे के साथ भाई चारे का सुलूक करना चाहीए। |
| Transliteration |
| Dafʻah 1: Tamām insān āzād aur ḥuqūq o ʻizzat ke iʻtibār se barābar paidā hu’e haiṇ. Unheṇ zamīr aur ʻaql wadīʻat hu’ī he. Isli’e unheṇ ek dūsre ke sāth bhā’ī chāre kā sulūk karnā chāhi’e. |
| Transcription |
| Gloss |
| Article 1: All humans free and rights and dignity's consideration from equal born are. To them conscience and intellect endowed is. Therefore, they one another's with brotherhood's treatment do must. |
| Translation |
| Article 1—All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience. Therefore, they should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. |
Hindustani and Bollywood
The predominant Indian film industry Bollywood, located in Mumbai, Maharashtra uses Modern Standard Hindi, colloquial Hindustani, Bombay Hindi, Urdu, Awadhi, Rajasthani, Bhojpuri, and Braj Bhasha, along with the language of Punjabi and with the liberal use of English or Hinglish for the dialogue and soundtrack lyrics.Movie titles are often screened in three scripts: Latin, Devanagari and occasionally Perso-Arabic. The use of Urdu or Hindi in films depends on the film's context: historical films set in the Delhi Sultanate or Mughal Empire are almost entirely in Urdu, whereas films based on Hindu mythology or ancient India make heavy use of Hindi with Sanskrit vocabulary.