Expert: Kedar Desai - 11/8/2007

Question
Hi:

I've read that Hindi and Urdu are virtually the same, but I can't tell what 'virtually' means in this context! Without other context, how easy are they for a native-speaker to tell apart, based on a very short phrase?

That is, if a native speaker of one language said, "Have a good night" or something that brief and bland, could you immediately tell if they were speaking Urdu or Hindi?

Many thanks.

Answer
At the level of the colloquial language that is spoken spontaneously or is heard in Bollywood movies, Hindi and Urdu are virtually the identical language. Thus,

gav men voh lajavab hai.
[There is no one like him in the village.]

They are, however, written in two different scripts, Urdu in the Perso-Arabic script and Hindi in the Devanagari script of Sanskrit.

In the literary or "chaste" dialect, Urdu uses many more Persian & Arabic words and grammatical forms than Hindi, whose literary dialect is more Sanskritised. But it is false to suppose Hindi lacks Persian & Arabic loanwords and Urdu lacks etymologically Sanskrit words. Both languages share a common lexicon that includes native (Indian), Arabic, Persian, and English loanwords.

When expressing the elevated thoughts of science, philosophy, art and politics, the Muslims of India naturally always drew from the wealth of Arabic and Persian literary words, whereas the Hindus turned toward Sanskrit. This accounts for the differences between Hindi and Urdu (in vocabulary but almost never in grammar), but these are differences which exist primarily at the elite level and in abstract vocabulary. For example:

Pakistani siyasat men voh lajavab hai. (Urdu)

Pakistani rajniti men voh lajavab hai. (Hindi)

[There is no one like him in Pakistani politics.]

It's a good rule of thumb that whenever Urdu and Hindi words differ, it is because the one is using an Arabic or Persian word while the other a Sanskrit loanword.