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India's definition of what is and what is not a language is highly politicized and highly idiosyncratic. Hindi and Urdu, by any reasonable linguistic definitio

India's definition of what is and what is not a language is highly politicized and highly idiosyncratic. Hindi and Urdu, by any reasonable linguistic definition are not separate languages. The official standards for both Hindi and Urdu, are both based on the form of the huge dialect continuum that spans North India and Pakistan, as spoken in Delhi. The only difference is that Urdu uses Persian and Arabic as inspiration/source for high vocabulary, whereas Hindi uses Sanskrit as a source for high vocabulary. And they use different scripts. But on the street level, the language is identical, not merely mutually intelligible. Many of the languages traditionally clubbed by the Indian government as Hindi are much farther away from standard Hindi than Urdu.

jfk13 7y ago
> on the street level, the language is identical Personal anecdote: when I first went to South Asia, I spent time in southern Pakistan and learned some basic Urdu. Then I spent time in north India, among Hindi speakers. The language I'd learned was immediately usable there, but my local friends could also tell where it came from -- and sometimes would tell me "Aha! yes, we know what you mean, but that's an Urdu word - in Hindi we say ...." So even on a basic street level, I don't think it's true that they're identical. Both part of the same huge dialect continuum, yes, but they're slightly different points on it. Whether to call them separate languages is as much a political question as a linguistic one, of course.
- mc32 7y ago
  Maybe it’s akin to Galician and Portuguese or Galician and Spanish (Castilian). For the most part about 90% of everyday vocabulary is similar and understandable by each other yet may have some unique differences which are enough to be called separate languages, even if both resort to Classic Latin for high words and roots.
- manbatman 7y ago
  Same way like Italian and Romanian and Spanish
  - owaislone 7y ago
    To some extent but not really. At the street level, it is very much possible for a Hindi and Urdu speaker to talk to each other and not realize they are speaking different standard languages. Spoken Hindi and Urdu are almost identical except some vocabulary which is also interchangeable in day to day use. If you speak Italian to a Spanish person, they might be able to understand quite a lot but they'll know that you are speaking Italian. This is not always the case with Hindi and Urdu.
  - init 7y ago
    Nope. Not at all. Even though they are all Romance languages they aren't mutually intelligible. They share many stems but have too many differences in grammar to be called the same language. You can perhaps argue Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are different dialects of the same language, or say the same for Portuguese and Galician but most linguists, Nordic and Iberian people will be offended by such a notion.
  - samsonradu 7y ago
    Not quite. As a Romanian speaker I can’t understand more than very basic Italian. Perhaps Spanish is slightly more understandable but still not to a 90% level for sure. I also doubt they understand any Romanian at all.
    - sterlind 7y ago
      Romanian kept its case system unlike the other Romance languages by virtue of ending up in the Slavic sprachbund. I'd wager that there are Slavic loanwords as well?
      - barry-cotter 7y ago
        11-14% > A statistical analysis sorting Romanian words by etymological source carried out by Macrea (1961)[88] based on the DLRM[99] (49,649 words) showed the following makeup:[89] > 43% recent Romance loans (mainly French: 38.42%, Latin: 2.39%, Italian: 1.72%) 20% inherited Latin 11.5% Slavic (Old Church Slavonic: 7.98%, Bulgarian: 1.78%, Bulgarian-Serbian: 1.51%) 8.31% Unknown/unclear origin 3.62% Turkish 2.40% Modern Greek 2.17% Hungarian 1.77% German (including Austrian High German)[97] 2.24% Onomatopoeic If the analysis is restricted to a core vocabulary of 2,500 frequent, semantically rich and productive words, then the Latin inheritance comes first, followed by Romance and classical Latin neologisms, whereas the Slavic borrowings come third. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language
- owaislone 7y ago
  They are almost identical. Standard Urdu taught in schools might be a bit hard to follow for Hindi speakers and vice-versa but on the street level, it really is almost exactly the same. As a native Urdu speaker, when I went to college in western India, people would often ask me if I knew Urdu and wanted to hear what it sounded like. They were always surprised when I revealed that I was speaking it all along as they assumed I was speaking Hindi which was technically correct as they really are the same language with different script and a bit of unique vocabulary. The day to day language that people of the region call Hindi or Urdu, and what you'll hear in all of the Bollywood movies is actually a mix of both. Many experts call the language Hindustani and consider Urdu and Hindi two dialects of it. A video from one of my favourite Youtube channels explains it in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxSd7p1i_TA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxSd7p1i_TA
  - u801e 7y ago
    I've noticed that some words have different pronunciations. For instance, the word for "definitely" is pronounced zaroor in Urdu but in Hindi, it's pronounced jaroor.
    - owaislone 7y ago
      Very true, in most Hindi speaking states people have a hard time pronouncing Z and often pronounce it as J even quite often even in English. Same thing with SH vs S. That said, I've personally seen this as a common occurrence among people who didn't study any other languages other than Hindi or didn't study any at all.
      - OJFord 7y ago
        I struggle with this sort of thing a lot, as I'm learning Hindi as a native English speaker. So I suppose I should learn it as za, (sabzi is an example that comes to mind), but just understand that if I hear someone else say it it may be ja? Everyone's going to understand za, even if it's not how they personally say it right?
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago
  > my local friends could also tell where it came from The same goes for my New York English in the South. As long as one speaker is cognisable to the other, the default assumption should be dialect, creole or pidgin, not separate languages.
- KorematsuFred 7y ago
  You are right. The OP's statement is pure falsehood.
_emacsomancer_ 7y ago
> Many of the languages traditionally clubbed by the Indian government as Hindi are much farther away from standard Hindi than Urdu. Indeed, a large percentage of 'Hindi dialects' are nothing of the sort. Many Rajasthani 'dialects' are far closer to Gujarati than they are to Hindi.
naravara 7y ago
>India's definition of what is and what is not a language is highly politicized and highly idiosyncratic. To some extent this is true of all languages, and it's a big part of nation building to draw the lines in whatever ways are convenient. Like, who decided Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian are all separate languages but Swiss, Quebecois, Alsatian, West African, and French versions of French are all the same? Where are we drawing lines if not at political boundaries? According to Hobsbawn, the original sources of developing national identity came from newspapers. Once the printing press became a thing, over time, whatever language a region read its news in slowly became the way for natural cultural divisions to form. The presence of news and a common literary canon created an imagined community around it. India didn't have nationalism form this way since British administrative districts cut across linguistic/cultural lines. They muddied the natural process of nation-formation by having everyone speak English as a lingua franca and relegating the native languages to private life. But the Islam/Hindu cleavage was still there, so that's where the division came in at independence. (Among other cleavages that the early government of India managed to keep under control).
- umanwizard 7y ago
  > To some extent this is true of all languages... Very true. An even clearer example is Catalan and Occitan, which are just the two most famous/prestigious/standardized poles in a still clearly-existing dialect continuum. Or Scots and English: polls suggest that people's answers to the questions "is Scots a separate language, or a dialect of English?" and "should Scotland be an independent country?" are strongly correlated. On the surface, it seems that the former is a scientific question and the latter is a political one, so they shouldn't be correlated at all, but in reality they are both political questions. Other examples include the various Chinese varieties (Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hokkien, etc. etc.), which are often considered one language for political reasons, Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian, which are nearly identical but often considered different languages for political reasons (imagine if we considered US American to be a different language from Canadian), Romanian and Moldovan to which the same description applies, and so on. There are examples practically everywhere you look.
KorematsuFred 7y ago
> Hindi and Urdu, by any reasonable linguistic definition are not separate languages. For any non-Indian person reading this, please note that this statement is 100% false. I am an outsider to Hindi speaking and Urdu speaking region. I have no dog in any political fight here but I have studied Hindi all my academic life and can assuredly tell you this statement is utter rubbish. But this might not be a fault of OP. A lot of people have this feeling because of Bollywood. Both Bollywood and Hindustani music is a cross of both Hindi and Urdu. If you never study Hindi or Urdu but watch a lot of Bollywood movies you will end up learning a bit of both the languages. But that does not mean they are same.
- random314 7y ago
  You are 100% wrong. The Bollywood Hindi is actually the real Hindi. It's not a mix of 2 languages. It's just one language - Hindi. Just like Hollywood English is simply English. The Hindi that is taught in text books in India is an artificial Hindi constructed 100 years ago by replacing Hindi words of Persian origin with words rooted in Sanskrit. So far this artificial language has stayed inside text books. If you actually speak text book artificial Hindi on the street, people will think you are crazy Which part of India wouldn't you say "Zara kitaab dena" Instead of text book artificial "Kripaya pustak Dena"
  - KorematsuFred 7y ago
    > constructed 100 years ago by replacing Hindi words of Persian origin with words rooted in Sanskrit That is untrue I have a master degree in Hindi. Bollywood Hindi is not Hindi in any sense. For example it does not match to a Navbharat Times to typical classic of Hindi literature. > Which part of India wouldn't you say > "Zara kitaab dena" Essentially everywhere from railway signs to classrooms to essays and everywhere. Bollywood is heavily influenced by Urdu but in general Hindi speaking heartland of UP one would perfectly ignore the Urdu influence.
    - trap3486 7y ago
      >Essentially everywhere from railway signs to classrooms to essays and everywhere. These are official government sanctioned institutions practicing text book Hindi. I have used it in classrooms too. This language is never used in the streets. Differing choice of nouns perfectly intelligible to each other doesn't even constitute a different dialect, much less a different language. There are cultural and scriptural differences and an effort to use more Sanskrit words in Hindi literature starting 150 years ago and an effort to use Persian words by Mughal courtiers words going back even further. I know several people from the Hindi heartland and absolutely noone uses pustak in place of kitaab or ullas in place of khushi, unless they want to be laughed at. That language belongs to classrooms, dramas and to a lesser extent Hindi literature. Just listen to this interview of mayawati. https://youtu.be/X8tbH-TCyqA https://youtu.be/X8tbH-TCyqA She uses awaaz, nafrat and afsos as well as English words and claims to be speaking Hindi. Is she wrong? Is she not from the heartland? Is she actually speaking Urdu? If you use these words like of Dil instead of hriday in an academic exam you will lose points, but that is an exercise in linguistic politics that any true student of language has no time for. I understand that Hindi and Urdu are taught as distinct languages in India and there is an ongoing effort to bifurcate the nouns used in both systems but this effort has been largely unsuccessful amongst actual speakers of Hindi. They have succeeded with news anchors, plays, newspapers etc. But not anywhere else.
quantgenius 7y ago
Hindi and Urdu are similar because of how they evolved and they are essentially the vernacular of parts of Northern India and Pakistan. Other Indian languages are nowhere near as similar to each other as Hindi and Urdu are to each other. Another thing to note is that the vernacular as spoken in India on the street is often not one single language. It's often a mix and the fact that it's understandable to you so long as you speak one Indian language should not surprise you. One thing Indians do subconsciously is adapt to using a mix of words and grammatical structure understandable to the group they are speaking to, for example when speaking to a well educated person who understands Hindi and English, I will frequently speak neither but rather Hinglish, mixing idioms and words from both languages in the same sentence, choosing words and idioms that most closely convey my thought. If I'm speaking to someone who also speaks Punjabi, I'll frequently throw in some Punjabi as well. None of this is done consciously. Also note that there are dialects even of Hindi. If you record Hindi spoken by someone from Bihar when speaking to someone else who also understands that dialect natively and only understands Hindi at the speed it's spoken may take someone from Punjab who also speaks Hindi some amount of focus to understand. However if you throw the person from Punjab into the mix of people speaking, the dialect and accent will adjust. This is something Indians never actually consciously realize they are doing. I only figured it out because I now have kids who we are raising in New York and teaching Hindi to and they haven't learned natively how to switch like that like kids growing up in India have. I've thought about this a bit and now think learning multiple "human" languages, ideally fairly different ones, should be absolutely required of everyone. Much like programming languages, there are certain thoughts you really can't think effectively in certain languages.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  > One thing Indians do subconsciously is adapt to using a mix of words and grammatical structure understandable to the group they are speaking to, for example when speaking to a well educated person who understands Hindi and English, I will frequently speak neither but rather Hinglish, mixing idioms and words from both languages in the same sentence, choosing words and idioms that most closely convey my thought. If I'm speaking to someone who also speaks Punjabi, I'll frequently throw in some Punjabi as well. This is called "code switching", a universal human phenomenon (not just in India) which I find extremely fascinating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching I have personally observed it happening between Spanish and English in ethnically Mexican communities in the Southwestern US, and ethnically Puerto Rican and Dominican communities in New York. Also between French and English on the streets of Montreal. > Also note that there are dialects even of Hindi. If you record Hindi spoken by someone from Bihar when speaking to someone else who also understands that dialect natively and only understands Hindi at the speed it's spoken may take someone from Punjab who also speaks Hindi some amount of focus to understand. However if you throw the person from Punjab into the mix of people speaking, the dialect and accent will adjust. This is true even in English, which is often considered (incorrectly) "not to have any dialects". I'm a native American English speaker, and I would have quite a bit of difficulty understanding a recording of a conversation between two people from rural Scotland or Northern England. But me and someone from those places would be able to communicate face-to-face just fine, slowing things down a bit and avoiding slang.
yumraj 7y ago
> Hindi and Urdu, by any reasonable linguistic definition are not separate languages. That is a common misconception. You are confusing colloquial Hindi and colloquial Urdu with the pure Hindi and pure Urdu. Pick a word, any word and there is Hindi equivalent and there is a Urdu equivalent. Just because the spoken Hindi, primarily in India, uses a mixture doesn't make them same or even similar.
- random314 7y ago
  I have replied elsewhere, but you are wrong.
  - yumraj 7y ago
    I have replied to your elsewhere comment too. Let's just agree to disagree and move on.
    - random314 7y ago
      No need to be rude because you are wrong. I agree that you lost the argument.
- jhanschoo 7y ago
  > reasonable linguistic definition For linguists, the colloquial language is the most important aspect of a language, and it's actually very reasonable for that. First, most languages do not have a written form, and for those that do, most could not communicate in writing until very recently. Second, until very recently, most people could not communicate in anything but their colloquial form, and even then, most communication is colloquial form. Finally, linguists are primarily concerned with analyzing what makes a language a language (vs. not a language) rather than what makes a language a language (vs. another language). For this reason it makes sense to consider only the colloquial language, since everyone who participates in a language to communicate and not for ideological reasons participates in the colloquial language, but the same cannot be said for "standard language".

jfk13 7y ago

> on the street level, the language is identical Personal anecdote: when I first went to South Asia, I spent time in southern Pakistan and learned some basic Urdu. Then I spent time in north India, among Hindi speakers. The language I'd learned was immediately usable there, but my local friends could also tell where it came from -- and sometimes would tell me "Aha! yes, we know what you mean, but that's an Urdu word - in Hindi we say ...." So even on a basic street level, I don't think it's true that they're identical. Both part of the same huge dialect continuum, yes, but they're slightly different points on it. Whether to call them separate languages is as much a political question as a linguistic one, of course.

mc32 7y ago
Maybe it’s akin to Galician and Portuguese or Galician and Spanish (Castilian). For the most part about 90% of everyday vocabulary is similar and understandable by each other yet may have some unique differences which are enough to be called separate languages, even if both resort to Classic Latin for high words and roots.
manbatman 7y ago
Same way like Italian and Romanian and Spanish
- owaislone 7y ago
  To some extent but not really. At the street level, it is very much possible for a Hindi and Urdu speaker to talk to each other and not realize they are speaking different standard languages. Spoken Hindi and Urdu are almost identical except some vocabulary which is also interchangeable in day to day use. If you speak Italian to a Spanish person, they might be able to understand quite a lot but they'll know that you are speaking Italian. This is not always the case with Hindi and Urdu.
- init 7y ago
  Nope. Not at all. Even though they are all Romance languages they aren't mutually intelligible. They share many stems but have too many differences in grammar to be called the same language. You can perhaps argue Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are different dialects of the same language, or say the same for Portuguese and Galician but most linguists, Nordic and Iberian people will be offended by such a notion.
- samsonradu 7y ago
  Not quite. As a Romanian speaker I can’t understand more than very basic Italian. Perhaps Spanish is slightly more understandable but still not to a 90% level for sure. I also doubt they understand any Romanian at all.
  - sterlind 7y ago
    Romanian kept its case system unlike the other Romance languages by virtue of ending up in the Slavic sprachbund. I'd wager that there are Slavic loanwords as well?
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      11-14% > A statistical analysis sorting Romanian words by etymological source carried out by Macrea (1961)[88] based on the DLRM[99] (49,649 words) showed the following makeup:[89] > 43% recent Romance loans (mainly French: 38.42%, Latin: 2.39%, Italian: 1.72%) 20% inherited Latin 11.5% Slavic (Old Church Slavonic: 7.98%, Bulgarian: 1.78%, Bulgarian-Serbian: 1.51%) 8.31% Unknown/unclear origin 3.62% Turkish 2.40% Modern Greek 2.17% Hungarian 1.77% German (including Austrian High German)[97] 2.24% Onomatopoeic If the analysis is restricted to a core vocabulary of 2,500 frequent, semantically rich and productive words, then the Latin inheritance comes first, followed by Romance and classical Latin neologisms, whereas the Slavic borrowings come third. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_language
owaislone 7y ago
They are almost identical. Standard Urdu taught in schools might be a bit hard to follow for Hindi speakers and vice-versa but on the street level, it really is almost exactly the same. As a native Urdu speaker, when I went to college in western India, people would often ask me if I knew Urdu and wanted to hear what it sounded like. They were always surprised when I revealed that I was speaking it all along as they assumed I was speaking Hindi which was technically correct as they really are the same language with different script and a bit of unique vocabulary. The day to day language that people of the region call Hindi or Urdu, and what you'll hear in all of the Bollywood movies is actually a mix of both. Many experts call the language Hindustani and consider Urdu and Hindi two dialects of it. A video from one of my favourite Youtube channels explains it in detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxSd7p1i_TA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxSd7p1i_TA
- u801e 7y ago
  I've noticed that some words have different pronunciations. For instance, the word for "definitely" is pronounced zaroor in Urdu but in Hindi, it's pronounced jaroor.
  - owaislone 7y ago
    Very true, in most Hindi speaking states people have a hard time pronouncing Z and often pronounce it as J even quite often even in English. Same thing with SH vs S. That said, I've personally seen this as a common occurrence among people who didn't study any other languages other than Hindi or didn't study any at all.
    - OJFord 7y ago
      I struggle with this sort of thing a lot, as I'm learning Hindi as a native English speaker. So I suppose I should learn it as za, (sabzi is an example that comes to mind), but just understand that if I hear someone else say it it may be ja? Everyone's going to understand za, even if it's not how they personally say it right?
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> my local friends could also tell where it came from The same goes for my New York English in the South. As long as one speaker is cognisable to the other, the default assumption should be dialect, creole or pidgin, not separate languages.
KorematsuFred 7y ago
You are right. The OP's statement is pure falsehood.

_emacsomancer_ 7y ago

> Many of the languages traditionally clubbed by the Indian government as Hindi are much farther away from standard Hindi than Urdu. Indeed, a large percentage of 'Hindi dialects' are nothing of the sort. Many Rajasthani 'dialects' are far closer to Gujarati than they are to Hindi.

naravara 7y ago

>India's definition of what is and what is not a language is highly politicized and highly idiosyncratic. To some extent this is true of all languages, and it's a big part of nation building to draw the lines in whatever ways are convenient. Like, who decided Catalan, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian are all separate languages but Swiss, Quebecois, Alsatian, West African, and French versions of French are all the same? Where are we drawing lines if not at political boundaries? According to Hobsbawn, the original sources of developing national identity came from newspapers. Once the printing press became a thing, over time, whatever language a region read its news in slowly became the way for natural cultural divisions to form. The presence of news and a common literary canon created an imagined community around it. India didn't have nationalism form this way since British administrative districts cut across linguistic/cultural lines. They muddied the natural process of nation-formation by having everyone speak English as a lingua franca and relegating the native languages to private life. But the Islam/Hindu cleavage was still there, so that's where the division came in at independence. (Among other cleavages that the early government of India managed to keep under control).

umanwizard 7y ago
> To some extent this is true of all languages... Very true. An even clearer example is Catalan and Occitan, which are just the two most famous/prestigious/standardized poles in a still clearly-existing dialect continuum. Or Scots and English: polls suggest that people's answers to the questions "is Scots a separate language, or a dialect of English?" and "should Scotland be an independent country?" are strongly correlated. On the surface, it seems that the former is a scientific question and the latter is a political one, so they shouldn't be correlated at all, but in reality they are both political questions. Other examples include the various Chinese varieties (Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hokkien, etc. etc.), which are often considered one language for political reasons, Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian, which are nearly identical but often considered different languages for political reasons (imagine if we considered US American to be a different language from Canadian), Romanian and Moldovan to which the same description applies, and so on. There are examples practically everywhere you look.

KorematsuFred 7y ago

> Hindi and Urdu, by any reasonable linguistic definition are not separate languages. For any non-Indian person reading this, please note that this statement is 100% false. I am an outsider to Hindi speaking and Urdu speaking region. I have no dog in any political fight here but I have studied Hindi all my academic life and can assuredly tell you this statement is utter rubbish. But this might not be a fault of OP. A lot of people have this feeling because of Bollywood. Both Bollywood and Hindustani music is a cross of both Hindi and Urdu. If you never study Hindi or Urdu but watch a lot of Bollywood movies you will end up learning a bit of both the languages. But that does not mean they are same.

random314 7y ago
You are 100% wrong. The Bollywood Hindi is actually the real Hindi. It's not a mix of 2 languages. It's just one language - Hindi. Just like Hollywood English is simply English. The Hindi that is taught in text books in India is an artificial Hindi constructed 100 years ago by replacing Hindi words of Persian origin with words rooted in Sanskrit. So far this artificial language has stayed inside text books. If you actually speak text book artificial Hindi on the street, people will think you are crazy Which part of India wouldn't you say "Zara kitaab dena" Instead of text book artificial "Kripaya pustak Dena"
- KorematsuFred 7y ago
  > constructed 100 years ago by replacing Hindi words of Persian origin with words rooted in Sanskrit That is untrue I have a master degree in Hindi. Bollywood Hindi is not Hindi in any sense. For example it does not match to a Navbharat Times to typical classic of Hindi literature. > Which part of India wouldn't you say > "Zara kitaab dena" Essentially everywhere from railway signs to classrooms to essays and everywhere. Bollywood is heavily influenced by Urdu but in general Hindi speaking heartland of UP one would perfectly ignore the Urdu influence.
  - trap3486 7y ago
    >Essentially everywhere from railway signs to classrooms to essays and everywhere. These are official government sanctioned institutions practicing text book Hindi. I have used it in classrooms too. This language is never used in the streets. Differing choice of nouns perfectly intelligible to each other doesn't even constitute a different dialect, much less a different language. There are cultural and scriptural differences and an effort to use more Sanskrit words in Hindi literature starting 150 years ago and an effort to use Persian words by Mughal courtiers words going back even further. I know several people from the Hindi heartland and absolutely noone uses pustak in place of kitaab or ullas in place of khushi, unless they want to be laughed at. That language belongs to classrooms, dramas and to a lesser extent Hindi literature. Just listen to this interview of mayawati. https://youtu.be/X8tbH-TCyqA https://youtu.be/X8tbH-TCyqA She uses awaaz, nafrat and afsos as well as English words and claims to be speaking Hindi. Is she wrong? Is she not from the heartland? Is she actually speaking Urdu? If you use these words like of Dil instead of hriday in an academic exam you will lose points, but that is an exercise in linguistic politics that any true student of language has no time for. I understand that Hindi and Urdu are taught as distinct languages in India and there is an ongoing effort to bifurcate the nouns used in both systems but this effort has been largely unsuccessful amongst actual speakers of Hindi. They have succeeded with news anchors, plays, newspapers etc. But not anywhere else.

quantgenius 7y ago

Hindi and Urdu are similar because of how they evolved and they are essentially the vernacular of parts of Northern India and Pakistan. Other Indian languages are nowhere near as similar to each other as Hindi and Urdu are to each other. Another thing to note is that the vernacular as spoken in India on the street is often not one single language. It's often a mix and the fact that it's understandable to you so long as you speak one Indian language should not surprise you. One thing Indians do subconsciously is adapt to using a mix of words and grammatical structure understandable to the group they are speaking to, for example when speaking to a well educated person who understands Hindi and English, I will frequently speak neither but rather Hinglish, mixing idioms and words from both languages in the same sentence, choosing words and idioms that most closely convey my thought. If I'm speaking to someone who also speaks Punjabi, I'll frequently throw in some Punjabi as well. None of this is done consciously. Also note that there are dialects even of Hindi. If you record Hindi spoken by someone from Bihar when speaking to someone else who also understands that dialect natively and only understands Hindi at the speed it's spoken may take someone from Punjab who also speaks Hindi some amount of focus to understand. However if you throw the person from Punjab into the mix of people speaking, the dialect and accent will adjust. This is something Indians never actually consciously realize they are doing. I only figured it out because I now have kids who we are raising in New York and teaching Hindi to and they haven't learned natively how to switch like that like kids growing up in India have. I've thought about this a bit and now think learning multiple "human" languages, ideally fairly different ones, should be absolutely required of everyone. Much like programming languages, there are certain thoughts you really can't think effectively in certain languages.

umanwizard 7y ago
> One thing Indians do subconsciously is adapt to using a mix of words and grammatical structure understandable to the group they are speaking to, for example when speaking to a well educated person who understands Hindi and English, I will frequently speak neither but rather Hinglish, mixing idioms and words from both languages in the same sentence, choosing words and idioms that most closely convey my thought. If I'm speaking to someone who also speaks Punjabi, I'll frequently throw in some Punjabi as well. This is called "code switching", a universal human phenomenon (not just in India) which I find extremely fascinating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching I have personally observed it happening between Spanish and English in ethnically Mexican communities in the Southwestern US, and ethnically Puerto Rican and Dominican communities in New York. Also between French and English on the streets of Montreal. > Also note that there are dialects even of Hindi. If you record Hindi spoken by someone from Bihar when speaking to someone else who also understands that dialect natively and only understands Hindi at the speed it's spoken may take someone from Punjab who also speaks Hindi some amount of focus to understand. However if you throw the person from Punjab into the mix of people speaking, the dialect and accent will adjust. This is true even in English, which is often considered (incorrectly) "not to have any dialects". I'm a native American English speaker, and I would have quite a bit of difficulty understanding a recording of a conversation between two people from rural Scotland or Northern England. But me and someone from those places would be able to communicate face-to-face just fine, slowing things down a bit and avoiding slang.

yumraj 7y ago

> Hindi and Urdu, by any reasonable linguistic definition are not separate languages. That is a common misconception. You are confusing colloquial Hindi and colloquial Urdu with the pure Hindi and pure Urdu. Pick a word, any word and there is Hindi equivalent and there is a Urdu equivalent. Just because the spoken Hindi, primarily in India, uses a mixture doesn't make them same or even similar.

random314 7y ago
I have replied elsewhere, but you are wrong.
- yumraj 7y ago
  I have replied to your elsewhere comment too. Let's just agree to disagree and move on.
  - random314 7y ago
    No need to be rude because you are wrong. I agree that you lost the argument.
jhanschoo 7y ago
> reasonable linguistic definition For linguists, the colloquial language is the most important aspect of a language, and it's actually very reasonable for that. First, most languages do not have a written form, and for those that do, most could not communicate in writing until very recently. Second, until very recently, most people could not communicate in anything but their colloquial form, and even then, most communication is colloquial form. Finally, linguists are primarily concerned with analyzing what makes a language a language (vs. not a language) rather than what makes a language a language (vs. another language). For this reason it makes sense to consider only the colloquial language, since everyone who participates in a language to communicate and not for ideological reasons participates in the colloquial language, but the same cannot be said for "standard language".