Ever since I started learning Hindi, I’ve been fascinated by the distinctions between Hindi and Urdu. My interest was piqued when I first visited the Wikipedia page for Hindi, where I learned that linguists categorize Hindi and Urdu as two “registers” of the same language, Hindustani1. In practice, however, it seems that many Urdu and Hindi speakers will talk about them as distinct languages.

Treating Hindi and Urdu as distinct languages goes beyond the informal and anecdotal. Urdu is one of the official languages of the Indian city Hyderabad (along with Telugu), while Hindi is not2. The language school I attend offers distinct Urdu and Hindi classes in the same way it does Punjabi and Garhwali (yes, you can learn Garhwali and even Kumaoni at the Landour Language School!); I take Hindi classes with some teachers, and Urdu classes with another. For me this is not like taking Hindi and say, Finnish lessons, or even Spanish and Portuguese lessons. The biggest distinction between my Hindi and Urdu classes is that when I read and write, I use the Devanagari and Arabic writing systems. When speaking, there are some words, greetings, and pronunciations that identify one as speaking Hindi or Urdu, but these distinctions are not of the type that I normally associate with two different languages. This gap between my perception of Hindi and Urdu and how others talk about them is fascinating to me.

Over the past few months, I’ve learned a little bit about modern Indian history (mostly through osmosis), and this has only served to intensify my curiosity about the Hindi/Urdu distinction. In particular, I’ve started wondering how the two languages developed over the past 200 years. I’ve come up with a list of questions, in no particular order, that have been on my mind. This post is not about answering these questions, rather I just want to organize some of the thoughts and questions that have been swirling around in my head for the past few months.

  • How long have people been using the word “Hindi”?
  • How long have people been writing Hindustani in Devanagari?
  • How many of the words in common use in the Hindi register of Hindustani were introduced as part of some official (ie state sponsored) effort to Sanskritize the language?
    • When did this Sanskritization happen, and how?
  • Have there been similar efforts to reinforce a Persianized lexicon?
  • Who was speaking Hindustani in 1850, and where were they speaking it?
    • If I were to go back to 1850, what would the geographic distribution of Hindustani look like? If I went to the mountains of the contemporary state of Uttarakhand, would I find Hindi speakers beyond travelers?
  • Have there been official efforts to promulgate Hindi/Urdu in areas where it wasn’t spoken 170 years ago?
  • When did the Hindi/Urdu split occur? Can we narrow it down to a specific year, or did it take place over many years?
  • To what degree does geopolitical tension between Pakistan and India reinforce the discretization of Hindi and Urdu? (In reality, people rarely use an entirely Sanksritized or Persianized lexicon when speaking Hindustani)

  1. The Wikipedia entry on the word “register” as used in linguistics defines it as a variety of a language that is used for “a particular purpose or in a particular communicative situation.” Apparently the use of the word in linguists literature is about as ambiguous as that meaning, with some linguists rejecting it altogether. The difference in the way I talk to my friends versus the way I write an email to the prime minister of Croatia are examples of two registers of English. When I think about this example, and then think about Hindi and Urdu, there are ways in which it seems to describe the relationship well, and ways in which it feels woefully inadequate. People will switch between Urdu and Hindi when talking to different people, which coincides well with notion that they are two different registers. Hindi and Urdu are also distributed very roughly along religious, political, and geographic lines, in the way language dialects might be. Here, it seems like describing the two varieties as registers doesn’t seem to encapsulate all that is going on. ↩

  2. I don’t believe that Hindi is the default official language for cities in India, as I’m sure many non-Hindi speakers would have a largely Dravidian word or two to say about it. That said, Hindi and English are the only two official languages of India. ↩