HINDI VERSUS URDU

           The difference between Hindi and Urdu is hard to define. In their everyday spoken forms the languages are virtually identical, but a philosophical debate in. either tongue would be incomprehensible to a speaker of the other. Their written forms are quite dissimilar. Hindi is India’s national language while Urdu is Pakistan’s. 

          Both Hindi and Urdu developed out of the dialect spoken to the west of Delhi. It was formalized into Urdu (using Arabic words and an Arabic script) by the Moghuls. In fact, Urdu was the language of the army, which was gradually refined and eventually became the language of the Moghul court. The same dialect also developed in a different direction, using words derived from Sanskrit, to become (proper) Hindi. There is therefore much common ground, to the extent that if you spoke Hindi to a Pakistani, he’d say you were speaking Urdu – whereas a north Indian would describe the same words as Hindi. 

But the languages are not the same, and as you learn more, the more different they become. Words for complicated ideas are different, as are many basic words (especially those to do with the family). Hindu religious words, such as namaste, raam raam, and so on, are taboo in Urdu. 

Hindi is also affected by politics, though more in theory than in practice, by people who wish to purge it of (foreign) words, i.e. those not derived from Sanskrit. Hindi pundits are trying (quite unsuccessfully) to replace commonly used English words with Sanskrit – derived ones: instead of (TV) for (television), they’d have you say duur-darshan, which hardly anyone knows. Ignore these, and use the words in this book, which are spoken in everyday Hindi.