There’s no difference at all between Hindi and Urdu? That’s… not true. Are they different languages? Well… not either. THEN WHAT ARE THEY?!?
It’s actually kinda hard to classify what a language is, especially when there’s multiple things to consider like dialects, jargons, accents, standardizations, connotation, etc. Now, Hindi is the national language of India, and Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, so obviously political troubles soon eclipse the efforts of linguists. This sort of thing is actually not that rare. BCMS, or Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian is one language. However, each of these four countries has standardized their own version of the language, which leads there to being four ‘languages’, at least in a political sense. This is called pluricentricity. Hindi-Urdu, BCMS, and Malay-Indonesian all exhibit these in various degrees. Now, Hindi and Urdu have diverged primarily because of one thing: RELIGION. Divides between Hindus and Muslims reach far back in time in northern India, and Muslim rulers spoke a different dialect from the common Hindus.
Both of these ‘registers’ or standardized dialects make up the Hindustani language, which is descended from Shauraseni Prakrit, itself a descendant of Vedic Sanskrit. Modern standard Hindi comes from the Khariboli dialect spoken in Delhi, while Urdu was developed during Mughal rule. The Mughals, even though they were of Turkic descent, hailed from Iran and spoke Persian/Farsi. Urdu absorbed many of these words, especially in formal language. These additions started to create distinctions between Hindi and Urdu. Many Muslim rulers adopted Urdu as the official language, while Hindi remained mostly limited to communities in the Hindi Belt of North India. Urdu adopted a significant number of Arabic words, some of which made their way into Hindi as well. Words like “kitab,” “shukriya,” “sharbat,” “kameez,” and so on, were borrowed from Arabic. Urdu also includes additional sounds to represent the sounds “q”, “z”, “x”, “f”, “zh”, “ġ”, “w”, “ṛ”, and “ṛh”, represented by the diacritic nuqta. Laymen unfamiliar with the intricacies of this exquisite, wondrously crafted, aesthetically pleasing …dot will pronounce words such as “sabzi”, “zindagi”, “laṛki” and “baṛa” as “sabji”, “jindagi”, “ladki” and “bada”. The more frequent use of the nuqta in Urdu leads to it sounding very different from Standard Hindi. Hindi is not meant to have the nuqta. However, Bollywood songs, which are both sung in Urdu and immensely popular across all India, have changed that somewhat. Many words are pronounced like they would with a nuqta, while some still have to catch up.
Another major difference between Urdu and Hindi is the writing system. In India, wherever you go, Hindi is written in the Devanagari script developed from the Prakrits and Sanskrit, while Urdu is written in the Perso-Arabic script. This script came to Urdu from Arabic via Persian, which simplified the script and added more letters to represent native sounds. So, someone who reads Hindi will not be able to read Urdu, and vice-versa. This is true for many languages, such as Punjabi, which is written in the Gurmukhi script similar to Devanagari in India, but is written in the Shahmukhi Arabic script in Pakistan. Kashmiri, which is officially written in the Perso-Arabic script, is written in Devanagari by some Kashmiri Pandits, and used to be written in the older Sharada script.
Hindi and Urdu in common talk are virtually the same, while news report might use more formal language derived from either Sanskrit or Persian, respectively. Only government decrees and other official things like that really make use of the ‘hoity-toity’ words, or as one should properly say, aristocratic/gentlemanly/noble/proper language.
As politics further divide the two, who knows what may happen? Maybe in the next 100 years they will be completely different languages; or, they could be the same language and people would completely forget that there ever was a difference. We can only see.
Anay Ganesh 