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Hindi or Urdu? Haha... I always find the "language vs dialect" thing very interesting. The distinction when it comes to Hindi and Urdu is totally political.

by JPKab 13y ago

Hindi or Urdu? Haha... I always find the "language vs dialect" thing very interesting. The distinction when it comes to Hindi and Urdu is totally political. Two of my old buddies, one an Indian, the other a Pakistani, could completely understand each other, yet both insisted that they spoke different languages (Punjabi/Hindi and Urdu respectively) Another friend of mind, who left Pakistan as a 10 year old, always just shook his head with a smile and said "Dude, that's like a guy from Alabama saying someone from England speaks a different language."

nl 13y ago
Hindi or Urdu? Haha... I always find the "language vs dialect" thing very interesting. The distinction when it comes to Hindi and Urdu is totally political Try Serbo-Croatian[1]. But OTOH, most Slavic languages are fairly similar. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian
- levosmetalo 13y ago
  Well, I would beg to disagree. While the standard Serbian and standard Croatian are very similar, it's more of an artificial. Even when that was one language official, one part of ex country called it Serbo-Croatian, and other one Croato-Serbian, and the versions taught at school were similar, but not the same. There were some language constructs that were in this common language just because they were present in one, and not the other, so that Serbo-Croatian was a strange mix. Not to mention dialects. Being a native south Serbian speaker, I had much better understanding of Macedonian and Bulgarian than those Croato-Serbian dialects spoken in the western or south Croatia. I guess if it weren't for that political push to make Serbian and Croatian language the one language, those language would be much more different today than they are. Not to mention that simply choosing another Serbian dialect as standard Serbian, and another Croatian dialect dialect as standard Croatian would make those two languages unintelligible. Instead, it was a political choice to choose two most similar Serbian and Croatian dialect to be official standard language, and then enforce that at schools. I know that for example in southern Croatia people were forced to use standard Croato-Serbian at schools, and people in southern Serbia were, and still are forced to use Serbo-Croatian at schools, TV and all official institution. Yes, language is a politics, and politics frequently molds languages in the direction it chooses. Orwell was not that far away with reality.
- zbrox 13y ago
  I would disagree as well. Most Slavic languages are much less closely related than Roman languages for example. I'm a native Bulgarian speaker and while I can catch some words when travelling in Serbia it's not that straightforward to understand others or to explain myself. I can understand people better in Croatia actually, which is kinda weird cause we don't share a common border. If I go to Poland, the gap becomes even wider. But for both the gap is significant. Grammar is different (e.g. inflections vs no inflections), pronunciation is different, hell even the alphabets are different.
kunai 13y ago
Urdu and Hindu are essentially the same thing -- except one is written in classic Indian devanagari Sanskrit-style script, and the other is written in Arabic script. And, of course, regional dialect -- but really, those distinctions are excusable in daily speaking. The related language families are just so related across the board -- Marathi, Punjabi, and Hindi -- that one can pick up the other with just a bit of practice.
- IndianEngineer 13y ago
  Not really. Im Indian but not a native Hindi speaker. I have trouble understanding Urdu, where as Hindi seems more natural to me.
  - OWaz 13y ago
    I see it differently. The languages aren't that far apart where native speakers couldn't easily converse with one another. I'm American but lived in Peshawar Pakistan as a kid and learned Urdu (in school) and Pashto (at home). I don't have any problems understanding most of the Hindi I've heard in Bollywood movies or from my Indian friends.
- srisa 13y ago
  What is generally spoken is a mix of Hindi and Urdu (Hindustani, as Mahatma Gandhi would have liked to call it). We rarely come across anyone speaking "Shuddh Hindi" or "Khalis Urdu" these days. English words permeate almost all regional languages. Dialogues of bollywood films used to have a fair sprinkling of Urdu words until late nineties. Film titles too used to be shown in three languages - Hindi, Urdu and English. Now a days we don't find much of that.
  - hmsimha 13y ago
    > English words permeate almost all regional languages. I wonder if, with the growing global connectedness due to the invention of the internet, we'll see a convergence of all spoken languages over the next hundreds or thousands of years.
- 13y ago
dsrguru 13y ago
A Yiddish scholar once said that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." It's really true. One might think that mutual intelligibility (ability for speakers of one to make themselves fully understood by speakers of the other) would be the standard for differentiating languages from dialects, but the distinction really ends up just being political. The spoken forms of Hindi and Urdu are entirely mutually intelligible but have two separate names. Many varieties of Arabic and Chinese are mutually unintelligible but are called "dialects" of one Arabic or Chinese language, presumably to promote a unified Arab or Chinese identity. Speakers of Moroccan Arabic and Levantine Arabic or of Mandarin and Cantonese can't understand each other any better than speakers of Spanish and Italian can, but we don't call Spanish and Italian dialects of Modern Latin! It gets even weirder when you have a dialect continuum, like with Polish-Russian-Ukrainian. Russian is somewhat mutually intelligible with both Polish and Ukrainian, but Polish and Ukrainian are not themselves mutually intelligible! So even if politics didn't play a role in the distinction between language and dialect, it would be hard if not impossible to come up with a universal distinction.
- hrkristian 13y ago
  The same applies to the Scandinavian languages, to an extent. A Norwegian will generally have little issue understanding both Danish and Swedish, while Swedes and Danes have a much harder time understanding each other. However, us Norwegians receive a lot of influence from our neighbors and so understanding of their slight differences in language comes as a side-effect of that. A kind of younger sibling complex. May the same apply to Poland and the Ukraine?
  - dsrguru 13y ago
    I don't know if that's the case with Polish and Ukrainian. That certainly is the case with Arabic where many speakers of Levantine or Gulf Arabic will probably understand Egyptian Arabic since they grow up watching Cairo-based media. Likewise, most Indians who don't speak Hindi will probably understand it perfectly since they grow up with Bollywood. I assume that's especially true for northern Indians whose languages are related to Hindi.
  - 13y ago
statguy 13y ago
They were essentially the same language also known as "Hindustani" with the distinction being that Hindi was written in the Devanagari script and Urdu written in the Nastaliq script. However, starting a few years before independence, the Hindus gradually Sankritized Hindi, while the Muslims Persianized Urdu. An example of this is the news in the national TV channels of India and Pakistan are in versions of Hindi and Urdu respectively that hardly anyone uses colloquially.
vicks711 13y ago
Hindi and Urdu are two completely different languages. Hindi has more words from Sanskrit. Urdu borrows more words from Farsi (If I am not wrong) and due to political reasons covers some holes with words from English. I am a native Hindi speaker. I can understand 80-90% of Urdu but cannot appreciate Urdu poetry etc. To give an analogy its like African Elephant & Indian Elephant. Different species.
yumraj 13y ago
That is not entirely true. Hindi and Urdu as pure languages are very different languages, and not just because of the script. Hindi originated from Sanskrit, while Urdu borrows from Farsi and perhaps some Arabic. However, colloquial Hindi and Urdu are somewhat-to-very similar and are indeed intertwined which is what allows most speakers of either language to understand each other. Give me a word and in most cases I'll be able to tell if it originates from Hindi or Urdu.
- kamakazizuru 13y ago
  precisely. In fact because Urdu is still spoken in parts of India (north & central) AND tends to be the preferred language of scriptwriters & songwriters in Bollywood - a lot of spoken Hindi has picked up a significant Urdu tinge.
michaelgrafl 13y ago
I grew up in Austria spending my summers in Croatia. My Croatian certainly isn't perfect, but I'm fluent and my Austrian friends certainly never get the feeling I'm unable to express myself when I'm talking to Croatian friends of mine. I always start shaking my head when either Croats or Serbs tell me that they speak different languages, because frankly, I can't even tell them apart. Sometimes they find my notion of their languages' sameness offensive, which in turn I find offensively childish.
mkaziz 13y ago
We use completely different scripts. And while the street language is the same, the moment you start getting formal, the languages start to differ widely. Non-colloquial Urdu is very influenced by Farsi, whereas non-colloquial Hindi is very influenced by Sanskrit. It's kinda like Ubuntu vs Kubuntu. They're both Ubuntu, but with different Desktop Environments.
driverdan 13y ago
> Dude, that's like a guy from Alabama saying someone from England speaks a different language. Related story: I grew up in northeastern USA. When I was young someone from Scotland came in for business. I went fishing with him and my dad. I had a hard time understanding most of what he said.
mnazim 13y ago
The irony with Hindi/Urdu is that both nations(or people of the nations) made it an issue of National pride. India Sanskrit-ized it, Pakistan Persian-ized and Arab-ized it. Otherwise both were basically the same languages with different scripts.

by JPKab 13y ago

nl 13y ago

Hindi or Urdu? Haha... I always find the "language vs dialect" thing very interesting. The distinction when it comes to Hindi and Urdu is totally political Try Serbo-Croatian[1]. But OTOH, most Slavic languages are fairly similar. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian

levosmetalo 13y ago
Well, I would beg to disagree. While the standard Serbian and standard Croatian are very similar, it's more of an artificial. Even when that was one language official, one part of ex country called it Serbo-Croatian, and other one Croato-Serbian, and the versions taught at school were similar, but not the same. There were some language constructs that were in this common language just because they were present in one, and not the other, so that Serbo-Croatian was a strange mix. Not to mention dialects. Being a native south Serbian speaker, I had much better understanding of Macedonian and Bulgarian than those Croato-Serbian dialects spoken in the western or south Croatia. I guess if it weren't for that political push to make Serbian and Croatian language the one language, those language would be much more different today than they are. Not to mention that simply choosing another Serbian dialect as standard Serbian, and another Croatian dialect dialect as standard Croatian would make those two languages unintelligible. Instead, it was a political choice to choose two most similar Serbian and Croatian dialect to be official standard language, and then enforce that at schools. I know that for example in southern Croatia people were forced to use standard Croato-Serbian at schools, and people in southern Serbia were, and still are forced to use Serbo-Croatian at schools, TV and all official institution. Yes, language is a politics, and politics frequently molds languages in the direction it chooses. Orwell was not that far away with reality.
zbrox 13y ago
I would disagree as well. Most Slavic languages are much less closely related than Roman languages for example. I'm a native Bulgarian speaker and while I can catch some words when travelling in Serbia it's not that straightforward to understand others or to explain myself. I can understand people better in Croatia actually, which is kinda weird cause we don't share a common border. If I go to Poland, the gap becomes even wider. But for both the gap is significant. Grammar is different (e.g. inflections vs no inflections), pronunciation is different, hell even the alphabets are different.

kunai 13y ago

Urdu and Hindu are essentially the same thing -- except one is written in classic Indian devanagari Sanskrit-style script, and the other is written in Arabic script. And, of course, regional dialect -- but really, those distinctions are excusable in daily speaking. The related language families are just so related across the board -- Marathi, Punjabi, and Hindi -- that one can pick up the other with just a bit of practice.

IndianEngineer 13y ago
Not really. Im Indian but not a native Hindi speaker. I have trouble understanding Urdu, where as Hindi seems more natural to me.
- OWaz 13y ago
  I see it differently. The languages aren't that far apart where native speakers couldn't easily converse with one another. I'm American but lived in Peshawar Pakistan as a kid and learned Urdu (in school) and Pashto (at home). I don't have any problems understanding most of the Hindi I've heard in Bollywood movies or from my Indian friends.
srisa 13y ago
What is generally spoken is a mix of Hindi and Urdu (Hindustani, as Mahatma Gandhi would have liked to call it). We rarely come across anyone speaking "Shuddh Hindi" or "Khalis Urdu" these days. English words permeate almost all regional languages. Dialogues of bollywood films used to have a fair sprinkling of Urdu words until late nineties. Film titles too used to be shown in three languages - Hindi, Urdu and English. Now a days we don't find much of that.
- hmsimha 13y ago
  > English words permeate almost all regional languages. I wonder if, with the growing global connectedness due to the invention of the internet, we'll see a convergence of all spoken languages over the next hundreds or thousands of years.
13y ago

dsrguru 13y ago

A Yiddish scholar once said that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy." It's really true. One might think that mutual intelligibility (ability for speakers of one to make themselves fully understood by speakers of the other) would be the standard for differentiating languages from dialects, but the distinction really ends up just being political. The spoken forms of Hindi and Urdu are entirely mutually intelligible but have two separate names. Many varieties of Arabic and Chinese are mutually unintelligible but are called "dialects" of one Arabic or Chinese language, presumably to promote a unified Arab or Chinese identity. Speakers of Moroccan Arabic and Levantine Arabic or of Mandarin and Cantonese can't understand each other any better than speakers of Spanish and Italian can, but we don't call Spanish and Italian dialects of Modern Latin! It gets even weirder when you have a dialect continuum, like with Polish-Russian-Ukrainian. Russian is somewhat mutually intelligible with both Polish and Ukrainian, but Polish and Ukrainian are not themselves mutually intelligible! So even if politics didn't play a role in the distinction between language and dialect, it would be hard if not impossible to come up with a universal distinction.

hrkristian 13y ago
The same applies to the Scandinavian languages, to an extent. A Norwegian will generally have little issue understanding both Danish and Swedish, while Swedes and Danes have a much harder time understanding each other. However, us Norwegians receive a lot of influence from our neighbors and so understanding of their slight differences in language comes as a side-effect of that. A kind of younger sibling complex. May the same apply to Poland and the Ukraine?
- dsrguru 13y ago
  I don't know if that's the case with Polish and Ukrainian. That certainly is the case with Arabic where many speakers of Levantine or Gulf Arabic will probably understand Egyptian Arabic since they grow up watching Cairo-based media. Likewise, most Indians who don't speak Hindi will probably understand it perfectly since they grow up with Bollywood. I assume that's especially true for northern Indians whose languages are related to Hindi.
- 13y ago

statguy 13y ago

They were essentially the same language also known as "Hindustani" with the distinction being that Hindi was written in the Devanagari script and Urdu written in the Nastaliq script. However, starting a few years before independence, the Hindus gradually Sankritized Hindi, while the Muslims Persianized Urdu. An example of this is the news in the national TV channels of India and Pakistan are in versions of Hindi and Urdu respectively that hardly anyone uses colloquially.

vicks711 13y ago

Hindi and Urdu are two completely different languages. Hindi has more words from Sanskrit. Urdu borrows more words from Farsi (If I am not wrong) and due to political reasons covers some holes with words from English. I am a native Hindi speaker. I can understand 80-90% of Urdu but cannot appreciate Urdu poetry etc. To give an analogy its like African Elephant & Indian Elephant. Different species.

yumraj 13y ago

That is not entirely true. Hindi and Urdu as pure languages are very different languages, and not just because of the script. Hindi originated from Sanskrit, while Urdu borrows from Farsi and perhaps some Arabic. However, colloquial Hindi and Urdu are somewhat-to-very similar and are indeed intertwined which is what allows most speakers of either language to understand each other. Give me a word and in most cases I'll be able to tell if it originates from Hindi or Urdu.

kamakazizuru 13y ago
precisely. In fact because Urdu is still spoken in parts of India (north & central) AND tends to be the preferred language of scriptwriters & songwriters in Bollywood - a lot of spoken Hindi has picked up a significant Urdu tinge.

michaelgrafl 13y ago

I grew up in Austria spending my summers in Croatia. My Croatian certainly isn't perfect, but I'm fluent and my Austrian friends certainly never get the feeling I'm unable to express myself when I'm talking to Croatian friends of mine. I always start shaking my head when either Croats or Serbs tell me that they speak different languages, because frankly, I can't even tell them apart. Sometimes they find my notion of their languages' sameness offensive, which in turn I find offensively childish.

mkaziz 13y ago

We use completely different scripts. And while the street language is the same, the moment you start getting formal, the languages start to differ widely. Non-colloquial Urdu is very influenced by Farsi, whereas non-colloquial Hindi is very influenced by Sanskrit. It's kinda like Ubuntu vs Kubuntu. They're both Ubuntu, but with different Desktop Environments.

driverdan 13y ago

> Dude, that's like a guy from Alabama saying someone from England speaks a different language. Related story: I grew up in northeastern USA. When I was young someone from Scotland came in for business. I went fishing with him and my dad. I had a hard time understanding most of what he said.

mnazim 13y ago

The irony with Hindi/Urdu is that both nations(or people of the nations) made it an issue of National pride. India Sanskrit-ized it, Pakistan Persian-ized and Arab-ized it. Otherwise both were basically the same languages with different scripts.