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> 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 U
by 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 agoMaybe 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 agoSame way like Italian and Romanian and Spanish
- owaislone 7y agoTo 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 agoNope. 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 agoNot 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 agoRomanian 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 ago11-14% > 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 agoThey 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 agoI'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 agoVery 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 agoI 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 agoYou are right. The OP's statement is pure falsehood.