Indian Languages: Difference between revisions

* Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu)

** Hindi is the most commonly spoken and most well-known language in India. This is because at the time of independence, Hindi had the most speakers. The government at the time wanted it to become the national language, but several ethnic groups protested because they were afraid of losing employment opportunities to native Hindi speakers. In response, the government gave Hindi the status of 'Official Language of the Union' instead. Hindi was never actually made the national language, but the government does endorse its use as a lingua franca by requiring Hindi to be taught as a first or second language in most places. Urdu is an official language of Pakistan, but it is also associated with Indian Muslims. Hindi and Urdu are very similar, to the point of being mutually intelligible. ForBecause thatthe reasonlanguages are nearly identical at the colloquial level, itlinguists isconsider debatableHindi whetherand theyUrdu aredialects separateof languagesa at[[wikipedia:Hindi–Urdu controversy|single "Hindustani" alllanguage]]. The main differences occur in the highermore (literary)formal registers ofand boththe languages,written whichforms: areUrdu nearlyis identicalwritten atin thePersian colloquialArabic level.script, Asand well,its Urduliterary isregister usuallyhas writtenPersian inand Arabic scriptborrowings, while Hindi is written in Devanagari, and its literary register borrows more from Sanskrit.

** Generally speaking, the farther you go from North/Central India, the less Hindi/UrduHindustani you will find. Hindi is not as common in South India as it is in the North. This is because South Indian languages are from an entirely different language family, and also because South Indians have been politically resistant to adopting the language. However, urban South Indians will sometimes use Hindi if there is a Hindi-speaking community in the area. This is especially true in the city of Hyderabad, which has significant Muslim influence in its culture and a large Urdu-speaking minority. Also, people in the southern state of Kerala are known to have high proficiency in Hindi (probably because the state itself is very cosmopolitan and affluent). Similarly, the languages of the Northeast tend to be in the Tibeto-Burman family. This, combined with the fact that there are some [[Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters|rather extreme separatist movements]] in the region, mean that there is not much Hindi spoken there either. English on the other hand is pretty common in the NE region, with several states claiming it as their official language.