As part of a scholarly project I’m working on (on Saadat Hasan Manto), I recently taught myself how to read the Urdu script. I had briefly learned it as part of a Hindi class in college many years ago, but then immediately forgot it.
I must admit, I’ve been finding Urdu quite difficult. Reading from right to left isn’t so hard to get used to, but there are some letters that seem to be interchangeable (i.e., two different ways of writing ‘k’/’q’), and other letters that look painfully similar to one another on the page (‘d’, ‘r’, ‘v’, etc). Also, some of the vowel markers one sees in Hindi/Devanagari, though they do exist in Urdu as diacritic marks, are frequently omitted, so you often have to guess which vowel should be used based on context. Oh, and did I mention that there often aren’t clear word breaks (depending on how the typography is done in a given book or newspaper)?
But once I got the script down (roughly), I was pleasantly surprised to find that Manto’s Urdu vocabulary isn’t that far off from standard Hindustani — but then, he’s a prose writer known for his accessible style. By contrast, the vocabulary of much Urdu poetry (i.e., Ghalib) is so full of Persian words as to be unintelligible — at least to a barbarian ABD like myself.
Via the News Tab (thanks, ViParavane), I came across a great post at the Language Log blog with a historical linguistics explanation for how the script (and language) divide came to be. I don’t have much knowledge to offer on top of what Mark Liberman says, so the following are the just the quotes in Liberman’s post I found to be most interesting.First, Liberman has several quotes from an article by linguist Bob King on the “digraphia” (Greek for “two scripts”) of Urdu and Hindi. First, we have the background:
Hindi and Urdu are variants of the same language characterized by extreme digraphia: Hindi is written in the Devanagari script from left to right, Urdu in a script derived from a Persian modification of Arabic script written from right to left. High variants of Hindi look to Sanskrit for inspiration and linguistic enrichment, high variants of Urdu to Persian and Arabic. Hindi and Urdu diverge from each other cumulatively, mostly in vocabulary, as one moves from the bazaar to the higher realms, and in their highest — and therefore most artificial — forms the two languages are mutually incomprehensible. The battle between Hindi and Urdu, the graphemic conflict in particular, was a major flash point of Hindu/Muslim animosity before the partition of British India into India and Pakistan in 1947. (link)
Then there are the social implications, which are not trivial:
One can easily imagine a condition of pacific digraphia: people who speak more or less the same language choose for perfectly benevolent reasons to write their language differently; but these people otherwise like each other, get on with one another, live together as amiable neighbors. It is a homey picture, and one wishes it were the norm. It is not. Digraphia is regularly an outer and visible sign of ethnic or religious hatred. Script tolerance, alas, is no more common than tolerance itself. In this too Hindi-Urdu is lamentably all too typical. People have died in India for the Devanagari script of Hindi or the Perso-Arabic script of Urdu. It is rare, except for scholars, for Hindi speakers to learn to read Urdu script or for Urdu speakers to learn to read Devanagari. (link)
(And yes, even those of us who pretend to be scholars struggle with “script tolerance.”)
Another scholar (Kelkar) gives some concrete examples of differences in vocabulary, with specific attention to the points of divergence:
Common words like chai ‘tea’, milna ‘to meet’, and mashin ‘machine’ are the same in either Hindi or Urdu. Vocabulary diverges sharply as we move from Low to High. The Hindi words for ‘south’ and ‘temperature’ (as in weather) are dakshin and tapman, the Urdu words junub and darja-e-hararat. The sentence “Who is the prime minister at the moment?” is ajkal pradhan mantri kaun hai? in Hindi, ajkal vazir-e azam kaun hai? in Urdu.
An Indian linguist has illustrated how far the styles deviate from each other by asking how the abstract expression “salvation’s true path” might be translated into Hindi and Urdu at different style levels and among different ethnic-social groups. Village people would render this as mukti-ki sacci sarak (Bazaar Hindustani). Pandits or educated Hindus would say mukti-ki satya upay (Highbrow Hindi). Cultured Muslims would translate the phrase as nájat-ki haqq rah (Highbrow Urdu). Indians who speak English as their second language might say salweshan-ki tru path. The only indication that these four “languages” are in some sense variants of the same language is the genitive marker -ki. Words like satya and upay in the Highbrow Hindi rendering are from Sanskrit. Every single content morpheme in the Highbrow Urdu version is from Persian or Arabic. One sees how dramatically the character of a language is changed when the sources of borrowed words for new concepts are as far apart as they are in Hindi and Urdu: we might as well be dealing with different languages. (link)
Liberman’s post ends with a reference to Gandhi, who struggled — as early as 1917! — to conceive of a “secularist” solution to the script problem, but failed to do so.
Obviously, with Partition, the terms of the debate over “standard” scripts changed in the Indian subcontinent. The debate in Pakistan is essentially over, and Urdu wins. But according to the scholars Liberman cites, the split over scripts is very much alive in India (especially northern India, though I have Muslim friends from places like Hyderabad who say their families only speak Urdu at home).
The joint/hybrid spoken language spoken in much of northern India is Hindustani (mostly Hindi grammatical structures with a mix of Sanskritic and Persian vocabulary), which seems to have persisted in northern India despite attempts at Sanskritization. But even with that shared spoken language, it appears the division over scripts remains.
two points
1) i can understand “low” hindi much more easily than stuff in bollywood. that is, i note that i can make out villagers being interviewed from UP and translated, but when i listen to the hindi it is more intelligible than the stuff in movies. frankly, it is sometimes more intelligible than stuff in bengali language films which uses a “elevated” diction. i think that gets to the root of the reality that until the “modern” era the difference between various languages on the mass level was clinal, grading. but the elite/literate level showed sharp discontinuities. i recall reading that the difference between “bulgarian” and “macedonian” is simply due to the local south slav dialects that literary languages are based upon. but if you move from the black sea coast all the way to macedonia it is a graded change, so that villagers on the border can understand each other with much greater ease than in other parts of macedonia or bulgaria.
2) it does get tiresome when some urdu speaking muslims act as if urdu is the language of muslims in south asia. i think there are muslims in kerala and bengal who would beg to differ.*
on the clinal gradation point, i obviously grant that this is true within language families, but not across, so much. e.g., using the eastern european example the south slav languages might be somewhat artificial creations of 19th century nationalism, but the difference between them and romanian or albanian are real and substantive, and the separation across linguistic zones is going to be relatively crisp. in south asia the appropriate boundary would then i assume be between indo-aryan and dravidian languages (though there is shared vocabulary obviously).
Dude, points for even trying to learn the script. Also, I want to point out that this divide exists to some extent in any Indian language that has large numbers of Muslim speakers…there will be a distinct style and vocabulary that is typical for them. Off the top of my head, Punjabi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, and Malayalam, all have a more Persianized register when spoken by Muslims (Malayalam may not be as differentiated as the others). Hindi-Urdu takes it to a whole different level as they are considered two separate languages and have gone their separate ways…whereas at least with the other languages I mentioned, they are still referred to as being the same language, just a muslim style vs a non-muslim style.
That being said, lots of non-muslims contributed to Urdu.
Yes, Razib just reminded me…you can add Bengali to my list.
Bollywood is ‘low hindi’ or Hindustani, often mixed with Bombay gangsta speak.
Rural UPites speak a dialect called Bhojpuri (also spoken in Bihar and other areas bordering Bengal) which has a greater similarity to Bengali than general Hindustani and that probably explains why you understand more of it (if you already understand bengali).
Really interesting topic and post (though I have no academic knowledge about it). My grandparents in Delhi always spoke somewhat wistfully about speaking Hindustani pre-Partition with some regret (as opposed to Hindi afterwards, though of course those labels are a bit fluid), almost like it was some kind of golden age. But, they never emphasized the script issue. I will have to ask my parents about whether they knew both scripts, or only Devanagari. My grandfather’s books seemed to be mostly in English, from what I recall as a kid, but that may be my own biased memory, from what I would look at!
I wonder how much of this is really Urdu as opposed to just Hindi peppered with phrases like “inshallah”.
Urdu won over Hindi but less than 10% of Pakistanis speak Urdu as their native language. In India language politics are no longer a big issue. In Pakistan there is fierce debate on whether Urdu ought to be supplanting the local languages. In addition in Pakistan spoken Urdu is very divergent from standard Urdu as words from regional languages and English seep in. I don’t think the same thing is happening to Hindi since so much of the intellectual discourse in India takes place in English, thereby preventing a high form of Hindu from becoming as entrenched in India as Urdu is in Pakistan.
Great post! I think it’s cool that you’re learning Urdu.
My dad and his siblings were all born before partition, and they learned Urdu (both written and spoken) as their “native language”. They didn’t learn Hindi till they were in their teens. In fact, my dad always thought of Urdu as his real language even though he was fiercely proud of being Indian. He even learned Farsi at school. (In those days, that was a common subject). I think it’s cool that he got to learn so many different languages.
Many hindu Maharashtrians in Madhya Pradesh and Nagpur speak Urdu-ised Marathi. Interestingly, Muslim Maharashtrians in Sangli, Satara mostly speak local variant of Marathi.
I met a Muslim girl recently whose family is from Bangalore, and apparently they speak Urdu as well (according to her, her family had been there for [at least three] generations, but then again she didn’t seem to know too much about her family background). I had no idea an Urdu-speaking population lived in Bangalore too?
WTF?? And please don’t think Modi = India. 🙁
1 · razib said
Thats coz the Hindi used in Bollywood is not standard hindi or khariboli but a Bombay based Bambaiya Hindi. We had trouble in school coz our text books were in khariboli and we spoke Bambaiya Hindi
Like for the english word “you” in khariboli one would use “aap” while in bambaiya hindi one would use “tum or tu”. The word “tu” is not Hindi word but is borrowed from Marathi.
First of all, great post Amardeep. And full marks for learning a new script!
I agree with the substance of Kelkar’s thesis, but his classification of Bazaar/Highbrow Hindi, Highbrow Urdu and Anglicised Hindi (or Urdu) is arbitrary at best. In reality, there are no such quantum boundaries amongst the speakers. People fluently switch between such and other dialects and mix them as well.
Nor is it possible to draw these lines on the linguistic continuum in any meaningful way. The words “salvation”, “true” and “path” have many more variants than the four cited above, and are quite likely to be found in mixed usage with each other. For example, “path” itself can be path (unstressed ‘a’), raah, maarg, rastaa, raastaa, sarak etc.
Also, the genitive marker -ki is not strictly common. “mukti-ki satya upay” would actually be “mukti-ka satya upay”, so there is a change of gender here. Further, Bazaar Hindustani is more likely to have the expression “mukti-ka sacci rasta” (or even “mukti-ki sacci raah”) than “mukti-ki sacci sarak”.
I am not a trained linguist, so apologies in advance if I have mistaken Kelkar.
Oops.. the last line of my comment should read:
“I am not a trained linguist, so apologies in advance if I have misunderstood Kelkar.”
Please let’s not feed the troll. Are Keshav and Lotia the same pesron, out of curiosity?
This is so interesting! My grandfather studied Urdu, Farsi and Sanskrit at school (pre-Partition, Lahore), largely because of his interest in classic religion, literature and poetry, and spoke Punjabi (his native-language) in the home. He didn’t learn Hindi until his teens/college, I think (although maybe it was even later as an adult when he and his family moved to Delhi?)
My dad was born shortly post-Partition, but he also speaks/reads Urdu and Punjabi and identifies with Punjabi as his native language (he speaks but does not read Hindi). My roomie speaks Urdu (her parents are Pakistani Punjabi immigrants and native Punjabi speakers, but only taught their kids Urdu), so she and I do “pidgin language exchanges.” We’re always delighted by how much is similar, and I actually think the differences between the languages (Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi) are interesting. They reflect so much in terms of literary influences, language mixing, travel, migration, and politics.
you are right re Malayalam – the language spoken by the Malabar Muslims is different from the Malayalam that I speak.
Excellent post, Amardeep, and many kudos to you for trying to learn Urdu script. My family traces its roots throughout northern India, but the past few generations have been scattered throughout Bihar until very recently. Their root language at home and amongst their “friendlies” was Bengali, but a dialect more Sanskritized. In retrospect, it makes sense given their proximity to Muslims living in their region – yet another (silly) way to distinguish their selves from the people around them. Eventually, many of my family members ended up speaking only Hindi and a pidgin form of Bengali, a trend that changed in the past two generations and will all but dissolve to English given the education that my generation seems to be getting in the States, abroad, and back home. The geographic and cultural rationale for spoken language are so closely tied to a sense of identity so it’s not surprising why Urdu and Hindi would evolve as they have in their particular regions.
whoot whoot hindustani! that’s all I gotta say.
Bravo, Amardeep, for making the effort. For just a bit of pain, you gain a new language with ease. It’s not like trying to learn Arabic, say, where you have both a new script and a completely new language — in spite of the ‘high-end’ differences, I’m sure it will actually come quite easily.
Turkey provides another example of ‘digraphia’, with shades of the widening Hindi/Urdu divide. Attaturk wanted to propel the country into the modern era by writing Turkish in Roman rather than Arabic script, and in the process also threw out many Arabic and Persian words, replacing them with Anatolian equivalents. Walking around Istanbul and seeing the incredible tugras, firmans other examples of Ottoman Turkish written in Arabic script, one does feel that the Turks today have become quite estranged from their recent past — even Pamuk, as I understand it, reads Ottoman Turkish in Roman transliteration. One can only wonder what sort of digraphic neuroses are being experienced by some of the Central Asians who have gone from writing their Turkic languages in Arabic, Cyrillic and now Roman scripts — sometimes in the space of a century.
I hate that…and it’s all too common. It’s like this massive neurosis they have about their own language.
Because there’s nothing like Urdu, so cut them some slack. My grandmother was a total Urdu snob and I guess it rubbed off on me. The style is definitely more elegant and there’s a sort of decency (for want of a better word) about the language. On my last visit to India, my sister-in-law was telling me how thrilled she was since her new maid happened to be muslim and her girls had finally started speaking hindi with “tameez”. I guess this is just a north indian thing and people from bombay probably couldn’t even tell the difference.
Before reading this post, my common sense understanding was that the difference between Hindi and Urdu is just in the nouns. The sentence structure stays almost the same for the two languages and only the noun changes. For example, one would say “Did you hear the khabar” (khabar suni?) and the other would say “Did you hear the samachaar” (samachaar suna?).
I don’t think more than a handful could ever understand the highly sanskritized hindi news or the highly arabicized Urdu news. Thankfully, Aaj Tak saved the day by reverting to good old hybrid hindustani. But I’ve noticed that the Urdu in India is losing its Persian influence and becoming more Arabic. Notice they’ve started saying “Ramadan” instead of “Ramzaan”? At least in the english language papers.
Vivek#15,
I think you are right, I would personally also phrase it mukti ka sachcha raasta or rah. I must say that I have never heard anyone use the hinglish version quoted in the paragraph. I grew up in a predominantly muslim area in Delhi and most of my close friends spoke chaste urdu, my paternal grandfather grew in pre partition Punjab and could read and write urdu/punjabi and hindi so for me there was no clear demarcation of when hindi ended and urdu began.
Divya,
To be honest I had never heard Ramadan till I came to America, it was always Ramzaan.
Re: Digraphia. See Konkani. Goan Konkani has (had?) Devnagari-Roman divide, somewhat similar to Urdu-Hindi debate.
And what, one wonders, of Sindhi — Hindu speakers of which write it in a Devanagari script; Muslim speakers in the modified Persian script designed for it by Sir Richard Burton? Today’s Pakistani Sindhi Hindus describe feelings of alienation from Indian Sindhis they meet abroad and presumably the feeling is mutual. But this they ascribe to perceiving themselves as “culturally 80% Islamicised,” as a Pakistani Sindhi Hindu friend puts it, with the political divide between Pakistan and India further exacerbating it. But pre-1947 when they were mostly all still together in Sindh there may have been some scholarly comment on the matter.
The malayalam spoken by the Moppila muslim community in Malabar(Kerala) has many loan words from Arabic. My understanding is that Urdu has been strongly influenced by Persian and less by Arabic. The Arabic and Persian languages are quite distinct from each other, even though Persian uses the Arabic script. After partition, there have been cases of Kerala Moppilas who suffered greatly in Pakistan because they could not speak Urdu. Moppilas were tortured by the Pakistani government and were suspected to be Indian spies, mainly because they could not speak Urdu.
Amardeep…..it is fantastic that you are learning another script. It is quite a challenge, particularly when it is as different as the arabic script is from devanagari or roman script.
Speaking of Urdu…..Urdu itself has a number of dialects, but I think there may be an increasing homogenization of the language itself. Dakhini, for example, is still spoken around Hyderabad (in Andhra) or Belgaum/Bijapur (in Karnagaka), but is increasingly being influenced by more “standardized” Urdu of the kind spoken around Delhi or Lucknow. While I have a couple of Hyderabadi muslim friends who can speak in Hyderabadi dakhini (since they spoke it at home), they say it is increasingly less common in the old city, and many muslims there speak a more “standardized” urdu of the kind you’ll see on, say, some pakistani TV serials.
Amardeep, nice post, and congratulations on learning the Perso-Arabic script. I can’t read it myself, and now I have no reason not to try to learn! My ‘higher Urdu’ vocabulary has improved significantly over the past year or so, just watching and listening to Pakistani and BBC Urdu news channels. My ‘Sanskritized Hindi’ vocabulary is quite good already, so in comparing the two, I find that I rather prefer the sound and flow of the ‘Urdu zabaan’.
One major difference I find between the languages is that – as far as the governmental, administrative and legal vocabularies go – Urdu is much better developed, and understandably so, since it can freely draw on Persian, which served as the administrative language during the Mughal and early British period. Hindi is significantly handicapped in that the words have to be invented anew, and have never been in everyday usage. I find also that spoken Urdu (‘Hindustani’) is much more receptive to the introduction of English words wholesale than is Hindi.
As a language of romance and poetry as well as comedic wit and repartee – also, Urdu is much better developed – and has a much (much) larger oeuvre. Bollywood dialogues and songs are still written in Urdu (although, there is a trend now to write them in Roman script.)
Shodan, good call on Konkani digraphia – actually there is a pentagraphia there – with Arabic, Malayalam, Kannada scripts also being used in addition to Roman and Devanagari.
As a South Slav who’s been observing the rapid evolution of my mother tongue, I find this very interesting.
As Razib already mentioned above, something similar has been going on in the Balkans for a while. Macedonian/Bulgarian is one example; Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian is another. Before the breakup of Yugoslavia, the language used to be called Serbo-Croatian (or Croato-Serbian). It was the native language of the majority of Yugoslav population, with the exception of Slovenes and Macedonians, who also spoke South Slavic languages, and Albanians, whose language is completely unrelated.
Before the war, roman script was used predominantly in the West of the former country, and cyrillic script predominantly in the East, but every kid growing up learned both scripts. Now, you will extremely rarely come across a Croatian publication written in cyrillic and Croatian children do not learn the script in school. Similarly, cyrillic is the norm in Serbia, though almost everyone in Serbia knows the roman script because of English and globalization. Those differences in script and also in grammar and vocabulary (relatively minor, but real) have been reinforced and exaggerated since the war by each side. The result is that children growing up on either side of the Croatian/Serbian border would have much more trouble understanding each other than do those of us who grew up in the eighties and before.
Unlike both Serbian and Croatian, Bosnian vocabulary has a lot of Arabic/Turkish loanwords and many of them are completely foreign to non-Bosnian South Slavs (making Bosnian sound very poetic). And, in Bosnia they also say Ramazan, not Ramadan – I had never heard of “Ramadan” until I crossed the ocean.
Yes. That’s why you shouldn’t feed the troll, people. Also, this is exactly why we ban for ‘handle-switching’ on the same thread. Creating a false sort of “momentum” for your position is lame and unfair. Onwards.
13 · Samir said
I always understood the “aap vs. tu” as a question of formality. In Punjabi, you’d use “tu” with equals and intimates, but “tusi” to address somebody above you in the social hierarchy. Living in Texas, my dad likes to point out the similarities between us and Latin@s. In Spanish it’s “usted vs. tu.”
“You say, camisa; we say kameez. You eat tortilla; we eat roti.”
Interesting post Amardeep.
I don’t like either highly Persianized or highly Sanskritized versions of Hindi-Urdu, but I did enjoy listening to some of the (highly Sanskritized) dialogues in the Mahabharat serials from some years ago…which interestingly were written by a Muslim. But regular, earthy, everyday, spoken, colloquial Hindi-Urdu sounds best to me.
As for The word “tu” is not Hindi word but is borrowed from Marathi., that’s completely false. Hindi has three forms of ‘YOU’…the formal (and grammatically plural) aap, the informal (and grammatically still plural) tum, and the singular tu. Punjabi has the formal/plural tussin and the informal singular toon.
Keep in mind Harbeer that you’d still use tussin when addressing a bunch of kids for example…not because you’re showing them respect but because it’s a group of people, you have to use the plural form.
Aaho!
🙂
7 · JGandhi said
J Gandhi, I have a somewhat oblique answer to your comment :), excepted from here. The author of the piece quotes Sauda, a poet who started to use Urdu/Hindi, “at the very cusp of the era when the Mughal elite began using Urdu for literary purposes” to make his point:*
Amardeep, very nice post. I do not know if you have a scholarly interest in this but David Lellyveld has written extensively about the choice of script in North India, and the identity politics related to that particular controversy. I will, time permitting, find some nice links to his work.
Great post! I have one question on the Mukti-ki satya upay part though. As far as I know, upay means “method”. So shouldn’t it be mukti-ka-satya-marg ?
32 · Amitabh said
Right, like “y’all.” In most Spanish, too, there is no informal 2nd-person verb form. (Who the heck uses “vosotros?”)
I also use tussin when I’m tryna get mah lean on.
I wonder if the “sanskritisation” of Hindi is because of religious divides. My own sense is that it started with the rise of nationalism in pre-independent India. Keep in mind, Persian and Arabic are not indigenous languages while Sanskrit is. So as we adopted our own identity as an independent country,it made sense to “indigenise” the national language.
Aw, yeah, this is the kind of post I’m talking about! Mashup of the Mutiny & Language Log! Excellent.
Congrats on learning the Urdu. It’s a huge goal of mine sometime in this life to learn Hindi or Bengali. Sigh. So many goals, so little time (yeah, being a bit lazy doesn’t help).
Upay also means solution; one of the features of sanskrit (and many other similar languages) is that words can differ in shades of connotation depending on the context. therefore you will often observe that shlokas use extensive wordplay where the same word is used in all its variations and hence the same passage is imparted with up to four or five different meanings.
also about sanskrit, it has a highly logical construction…it is probably one of the most “logical” languages in the history of human languages. mathematicians and linguists–most notably panini–contributed extensively in developing it, and this is the reason why logic and linguistics was highly developed in ancient india. in fact you can find shades of chomskyian “generative grammer” in the works of panini (chomsky himself has noted as much …
I have made the mistake of telling my Amrikan friends that my pak friend speaks Hindi only to be rebuffed by her saying she speaks Urdu. I tend to ignore the difference especially coming from Hyderabad where people in old city speak Hyderabadi Hindi + Urdu mish-mashed. But I know this, Urdu is not an option in many central syllabus schools around Hyderabad, Telugu, Sanskrit and Hindi are. Most people in my generation from Hyderabad have their exposure to Urdu from a mandatory Urdu news program in Doordarshan after Telugu news, which was started in early 90’s (for political reasons). And beginning 2000 many bus numbers (not route no.s, I mean the tag registration) were painted in Telugu or Urdu. Funny, because the registration itself consisted of English Alphabets and numbers. And then of course there was “Anjuman” on Doordarshan where Urdu Shaayari would go on with a bunch of people wah-wah-ing after every sentence. Amardeep, your take on the poetic qualities of Urdu? Btw, excellent post.
I basically feel that Urdu IS Hindi with a Persianized vocabulary. The base of the language is Hindi. Urdu in many ways is analagous to Hinglish…a Hindi substrate with a heavy superstructure from another language. The Hinglish which is used all over print ads and other advertising media in India (and written in the Roman script) is, in a way, a literary form of Hinglish.
I’ll put it this way…whatever difference exists between Persian and Urdu, is Hindi. In other words, whatever words Urdu speakers use that Persian speakers do not, is usually a Hindi word. That includes all the pronouns, all the grammar, the postpositions, and quite a large chunk of daily vocabulary.
I should point out that one difficulty faced by Punjabi literati from Pakistan when collaborating with their Indian counterparts, is not only the two scripts, but that even Punjabi has become more and more Persianized in Pakistan, and more and more Sanskritised in India. Overall though I think ‘theth’ or pure, hardcore Punjabi words (which are neither Persian nor Sanskrit) are better preserved in India. This difference is most notable in pop music…Punjabi pop music in India is often still difficult for a Hindi-Urdu speaker to follow, whereas Pakistani Punjabi pop music is very easy for the average Hindi/Urdu speaker to understand. Ironically, the hardest Punjabi music seems to come from the UK…which is also where traditional instruments like dhad, algoza, tumbi, etc. are used most.
10 · nala said
There is a significant Urdu speaking population in Bangalore but their Urdu is a version of Dakhni, mentioned elsewhere. It’s somewhat similar but a little harder to understand (for someone who understands Hindustani/Urdu) than the Hyderabadi dialect.
wonder how much of this is really Urdu as opposed to just Hindi peppered with phrases like “inshallah
‘Inshallah’ is Arabic, not Urdu.
I hate it too. Most Pakis speak Urdu with a Punjabi accent (except for the Muhajirs). Its rather painful to hear.
Also even the Mujahirs in Pakistan and their kids have picked up ridiculous words like ‘iddhar’ uddhar’ ‘tu’ from the dominant culture.
Urdu also has identifiable Turkish and Arabic words. Also, Persian and Sanskrit are Indo-European languages, while Turkish and Arabic are not, so this is an important aspect of the difference between Urdu and Hindi.
So, while I certainly agree that the ‘base’ of Urdu is a form of Hindi (that is, the grammar and a very basic vocabulary), Urdu also has many words that are neither from Persian nor from Hindi.
It’s also worth acknowledging that a number of Urdu idioms are directly derived from an Islamic religious milieu, but that should not prevent Sikhs or Hindus from fully enjoying the language 🙂
Most of the Arabic words (not sure about the Turkish) came to Hindi-Urdu via Persian. Persian itself is a highly arabicized language, although it is indeed an Indo-European tongue. During the Shah of Iran’s rule, there was an effort to purge Persian of its non-Persian (read: Arabic) vocabulary and influences…much as in India they tried to get rid of the Perso-arabic vocab. For that matter literary Turkish used to be a highly Perso-Arabic influenced language as well (called Ottoman Turkish), so in that sense very analagous to Urdu. The Turks successfully managed to purge their language of most non-Turkish elements, as was alluded to upthread, and young turks (haha) can not understand Ottoman Turkish.
These processes (both the infiltration of foreign elements in a language as well as their subsequent removal) are often NOT organic, but rather deliberate actions based on power, domination, politics, and religion. I usually don’t have a big problem with organic processes, so I enjoy the fact that much Perso-Arabic vocab has become a part of Hindi or Punjabi. What I don’t like are the deliberate removal of common words and replacing them with wholesale unnecessary borrowings from other languages, just to fit a notion of what’s more sophisticated or to fulfill whatever agenda.
Amitabh, you make some very good points. I think the Turkish words might have started coming in from the time of the Turkish (Slave) Dynasty in the Delhi Sultanate from the 11th Century onwards. But Turkish ‘nobles’ were part of the ruling classes throughout India’s subsequent history as well, all the way to the 20th Century – for example, with the Nizam of Hyderabad. So that’s another possible channel. In fact, the word ‘Urdu’ is itself of Turkish origin (‘ordu’ = camp) and supposedly also related to the English word ‘horde’!
glad to see your efforts to learn urdu were far more successful than mine! like you, my college hindi class had a mandatory urdu component, but the professor was a bit shady, which made it that much harder to learn a script that depends heavily on nuance (and clear handwriting). will you be using this knowledge to discover more urdu literature that is less often translated?