Hindustani language
Categories: Languages of India | Languages of Pakistan | Languages of Fiji
- See also: Hindustani classical music.
Hindustani is a term used by linguists to describe several closely related idioms in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent. It encompasses two standardized registers in the form of the official languages of Hindi and Urdu, as well as several nonstandard dialects.
The term has had a complex history, holding different meanings to different people. In Bollywood, for example, the intentionally neutral language of Indian film is often referred to as Hindustani.
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History of the name
Originally the term Hindustānī ("of the land of the Hindus") was the name given by the Turco-Persian Mogul conquerors of India to Khariboli, the local form of Hindi at their capital, Delhi, and nearby cities. As a contact language between the two cultures, Hindustani absorbed large numbers of Persian, Arabic, and Turkic words, and with further Moslem conquest it spread as a lingua franca across northern India. It remained the primary lingua franca of India for the next four centuries, although it varied significantly in vocabulary depending to the local language, and it acheived the status of a literary language, along with Persian, in the Moslem courts. In time it came to be called Urdu (zabān-i-urdū "language of the army/camp" in Persian), and as the highly Persianized court language, rexta, or "mixed".
When the British conquered India in the late 1800's, they used the words 'Hindustani' and 'Urdu' interchangeably. They developed it as the language of administration of British India, further preparing it to be the official language of modern India and Pakistan.
With the partition of India in 1947, the new states of Pakistan and India chose Persianized and Sanskritized registers of Hindustani as their national languages. These they called "Urdu" and "Hindi" respectively. Since this time, the term "Urdu" has ceased to mean the lingua franca, although nonstandard Hindustani dialects are often still considered to be dialects of Urdu.
In recent times the word has been used for the intentionally neutral language of Bollywood film, which is popular in both India and Pakistan. This, along with nationalistic propaganda which claims that Hindi and Urdu have always been separate languages, has led to the widespread belief that Hindustani is a mixture of Hindi and Urdu.
The term Hindi is also ambiguous, adding to the confusion. Beside the standard language, "Hindi" is still used in its broader original sense to refer to numerous vernaculars that stretch across northern India. The term "Hindi-Urdu" is sometimes used for Hindi in this broad sense, including Urdu, but is often synonymous with Hindustani.
Urdu
Urdu is the official language of Pakistan and the official language of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, as well as an officially recognized regional language in India. The word "Urdu" derives from the more formal phrase Urdu-e-Moalla, a Turco-Persian phrase referring the "language of the camp". (The word has the same root as the English word "horde", a word that owes its existence to the armies of the Mongol ancestors of the Mughals.) The language began as the common speech of soldiers serving Mughal lords. The term became transferred to the court language of the Mughal aristocracy, whose dialect was based on the upper-class dialect of Delhi. Urdu's historical development was centered on the Urdu poets of the Mughal courts of north Indian metropolises such as Delhi, Lucknow, Lahore, and Agra. Urdu is written using a modified form of the Arabic script.
Various Meanings of "Hindi"
Standard Hindi, the official language of India, is based on the Khariboli dialect of the Delhi region and differs from Urdu in that it is usually written in the indigenous Devanagari script of India. A more scholarly, Sanskritized form of Hindi developed primarily in Varanasi, the Hindu holy city, and is based on the Eastern Hindi dialect of that region. The term "Hindi" can be an ambiguous term, referring variously to:
- (1) standardized Hindi as taught in schools throughout India,
- (2) formal or official Hindi advocated by Purushottam Das Tandon and as instituted by the post-independence Indian government, heavily influenced by Sanskrit,
- (3) the vernacular dialects of Hindustani/Hindi-Urdu as spoken throughout India,
- (4) the neutralized form of the language used in popular television and films, or
- (5) the more formal neutralized form of the language used in broadcast and print news reports.
Bazaar Hindustani
In a specific sense, "Hindustani" may be used to refer to the dialects and varieties used in common speech, in contrast with the standardized Hindi and Urdu. This meaning is reflected in the use of the term "bazaar Hindustani," in other words, the language of the street or the marketplace, as opposed to the perceived refinement of formal Hindi, Urdu, or even Sanskrit.
Variants of Hindustani
Hindustani has four commonly named varieties:
- Hindi (High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, Literary Hindi, Standard Hindi);
- Urdu (Standard Urdu);
- Dakhini, a less Persianlized dialect of Urdu spoken in the region of Hyderabad;
- Rekhta, the highly Persianlized variety of Urdu spoken in the Mogul court, and used for poetry.
Hindi and Urdu
While grammatically, Urdu and Hindi are considered dialects of a single language (or diasystem), they differ (in formal tongue) vastly in vocabulary; wherein Urdu draws heavily on Persian and Arabic and Hindi on Sanskrit and to a lesser extent Prakrit.
The associated dialects of Urdu and Hindi are known as the "Hindustani". It is perhaps the lingua franca of the west and north of the Indian subcontinent, though it is understood widely in other regions as well. A common vernacular sharing characteristics with Urdu, Sanskritized Hindi, and regional Hindi, Hindustani is more commonly used as a vernacular than highly Arabicized/Persianized Urdu or highly Sanskritized Hindi.
This can be seen in the popular culture of Bollywood or, more generally, the vernacular of Pakistanis and Indians which, while utilizing a good deal of Hindi verbiage, is interpersed with large amounts of Urdu, hence making the language of Bollywood movies sound as much Urdu as it is Hindi. Minor subtleties in region will also affect the 'brand' of Hindustani, sometimes pushing the Hindustani closer towards Urdu or towards Hindi. One might reasonably assume that the language spoken in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh (known for its beautiful usage of Urdu) and Benares (a holy city for Hindus and thus using highly Sanskritized Hindi) is somewhat different. A humorous way of putting it would be that the Lucknow lehejaa (accent in Urdu) is of a different shade than the Benares ucchaaran (accent in Hindi).
Hindustani, if both Hindi and Urdu are counted, is the third or second most extensively understood language in the world after Mandarin and possibly English.
See Also
de:Hindustani fr:Hindoustani kw:Hindoustani nds:Hindi-Urdu ja:ヒンドゥスターニー語 pl:Język hindustani