About: What is 'Hindi Urdu'?

Hindi Urdu in Devanagari and Nashtaliq

Hindi and Urdu may be considered separate languages, and they can certainly differ, as the examples to the right (“Hindi” written in Devanagari and “Urdu” written in Perso-Arabic script) show, but they can also be considered varieties of the same language, since they developed from the same “khari boli” dialect spoken in North India and share the same grammar and much basic vocabulary. Mahatma Gandhi wanted the two languages to merge as a subcontinent-wide “Hindustani”, but following the partition of India in 1947, Urdu became the national language of Pakistan and Hindi the official language of India, although Urdu also has official status in India and Indian cities like Aligarh, Hyderabad, and Lucknow remain important centers of Urdu culture and learning. The basic spoken language remains the same, but in formal contexts, Hindi uses vocabulary from Sanskrit, the classical language which is the ancestor of both Hindi and Urdu, while Urdu uses vocabulary from Arabic and Persian. However, in the movies, on cable TV, and on the street there is very little difference between Hindi and Urdu.

Hindi is usually ranked second among the world’s languages in terms of number of speakers; 40% of the population of India speaks Hindi natively with a considerable number using it as a second language, so that the total number of Hindi speakers is well over a half a billion. Urdu has approximately 50 million native speakers in India; Pakistan has much fewer native speakers, but almost the entire population of 175 million speaks Urdu as a second language.

Hindi and Urdu are Indo-European languages distantly related to English with a similar range of tenses and some cognate vocabulary, such as maataa ‘mother’, dããt ‘tooth’, do ‘two’, as well as features lost in English but still common in related European languages, such as noun gender and informal and formal ‘you’.

Flagship students study both Hindi and Urdu so that they can fully appreciate the full cultural range of both varieties: Hindi and Urdu poetry and prose, the very different religious expression in Hindi and Urdu, and the manner in which the writing systems and literary expressions reflect the very different cultures represented by Hindi and Urdu.