The Most Mutual intelligible languages: Urdu and Hindi

Presented by:Muhammad Azam

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Different Views about Urdu

• It Shares it roots with Persian

• it’s pretty much the same language” as Hindi.

• Urdu isn’t the same as Hindi…Urdu is in fact almost a mix of Hindi/Farsi.

• Urdu vocabulary contains approximately 70% Persian and the rest being a mix of Arabic and Turkish.

Different Views about Urdu

• When linguists describe language groups, they talk about language trees. Every language has roots. It has sister branches with which it shares common ancestors, and just because it absorbs some vocabulary from another language doesn’t mean that its fundamental structure is changed.

• For example, our use of Japanese words like “sushi” and “karaoke” doesn’t mean that English is closely related to Japanese.

Languages and Dialects

• Urdu is technically classified as an Indo-European language on the Western Hindi branch of the language tree. It does not only share roots with Hindi, but linguists actually classify Hindi-Urdu as one language with four distinct dialects: Hindi, Urdu, Dakhini (spoken in northern India) and Rekhta (used in Urdu poetry).

Languages and Dialects

• Dialects differ from each other in the same way languages do: – syntax (structure)– phonetics (sounds)– phonology (systems of sound changes)– morphology (systems of grammatical changes) – semantics (meaning)

• Two ways of speaking diverge into two different languages due to the degree of difference rather than the types of differences.

Languages and Dialects

• Heather Carreiro, who has lived in Morocco and Pakistan

• I’ve crossed the Indo-Pak border multiple times, and as long as I remember to swap Salaam alaikum for Namaste when greeting people and shukriya for dhanyabad when thanking people, nobody in India ever questioned my Hindi. At the intermediate level, I experienced 100% mutual intelligibility.

• I could understand Hindi speakers, and they could understand me. Most people in India asked me where I had learned Hindi, and when I responded that I had studied Urdu in Pakistan they were surprised.

Languages and Political-Cultural Identity

• Hindi and Urdu both originated in Delhi and have roots in Sanskrit. After the Muslim conquest by Central Asian, invaders in the 11th and 12th centuries, the new rulers learned the local tongue.

• These rulers spoke Persian and Turkish and wrote their languages in the Arabic Nastaliq script, so when they started speaking Hindi-Urdu they wrote this new language in the Nastaliq script as well.

• By the 16th century, it had developed into a dialect of its own termed Urdu with a prominent literary culture revolving around the royal court.

Languages and Political-Cultural Identity

• Because it was used by Muslim rulers and became largely used by the Muslim population, a number of Farsi, Turkish and Arabic loan words made their way into Urdu.

• Hindi, on the other hand, retained its religious and formal vocabulary from Sanskrit and utilized the traditional Devanagari script.

• Nowadays, a Muslim Urdu-speaking imam and a Hindu priest may have difficulty discussing deep theological topics with one another due to these differences in vocabulary, but for normal conversations they would be able to understand each other just fine.

Languages and Political-Cultural Identity

• From a linguistic standpoint, the idea that Urdu is more closely related to Arabic than Hindi is simply ridiculous. Urdu itself is only the native language of about 10% of the Pakistani population. Most families who speak Urdu as their first language emigrated from India during the 1947 partition.

Languages and Political-Cultural Identity

• In South Asia it is more the idea that Urdu and Hindi are different languages that represent different cultures that prevails over their linguistic similarities as sister dialects.

• We often choose to believe and promote what makes sense in our worldview, and when people come in and question the way we define ourselves or our culture we aren’t very likely to change the way we think about things.