# Hindi/Urdu: mutual intelligibility



## bobbybob1

My friend lives in Northern India, I want to be able to talk and chat in hindi. There are no courses in hindi locally but I can learn urdu at a local college. Are the 2 languages similar enough in general conversation  (ie chatting about life! )to learn urdu and be understood by hindi speakers?


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## linguist786

bobbybob1 said:


> My friend lives in Northern India, I want to be able to talk and chat in hindi. There are no courses in hindi locally but I can learn urdu at a local college. Are the 2 languages similar enough in general conversation (ie chatting about life! )to learn urdu and be understood by hindi speakers?


In a word, yes


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## vince

Could someone explain the relationship between Hindi and Urdu?

Is Urdu:
- a creole of Hindi (or an ancestor thereof) and Farsi?
- kind of like Modern English which is a Germanic language (Anglo-Saxon) dominated by non-Germanic Romance-based vocabulary in higher registers. Urdu would be an Indo-Aryan language (Hindi) dominated by non-Indo-Aryan Iranian-based vocabulary in higher registers.

?


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## panjabigator

The title slips me now, but there is an excellent book on the subject called something like "One script: Two languages."  If your library has it, I would refer to it for a good background.  But to summarize:

I wouldn't use the term creole to label Urdu.  When the Mughals and Persians were colonizing India, they brought many loan words.  They created a hybrid (I guess a Creole in a sense) with Indic structure and Persian/Arabic loan words.  In the beginning, that was known as Hindi.  Hindi itself is a foreign term.  LAter on, the word Urdu was used to identify the Persianized register whereas Hindi was reserved for the Sanskritized.  

Your example with modern English is a good one.  I guess in this case, if English where to go back and coin new words it would be "Hindi" and the English in its current state would be "Urdu."  But different dialects of Hindi have different amounts of loan word penetration. In Chattisgarh for example, "Urdu" words are infrequent.  In Delhi [where the dialect is known as Khadi Boli (standing speech)], there are plenty!


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## Setwale_Charm

The question is , to what extent are they mutually comprehensible? Could somebody compare them to two other languages, maybe even in Europe, which are also related to each other. Whenever I try to detect the exact difference between Bosnian and Serbian/Croatian, everybody agrees they do differ but nobody can put their finger on the actual differences. 
 In my experience I have already come across some basic words which differ considerably i Hindi and Urdu.


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## panjabigator

Well, I speak with my Pakistani friends all the time in Hindi.  They tell me I speak good Urdu...hehe.  I don't even realize!  I think you just have to be aware of the register you are speaking in, and make sure you choose the appropriate vocab.  I have had several instances where people did not know the word I used.  One was the word for language and the other for fault (culpability).  But in day to day conversation, the languages are identical.  No noticable accent should be found.  Indians do tend to mispronounce some letters though, but educated ones shouldn't.


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## vince

Going along with the analogy with English,

would the divergent vocabulary between Hindi and Urdu be summarized as the same as the words in English that are based on French-Latin-Greek?

i.e. if you translated this post into Hindi and Urdu, the only words that would be different in Hindi and Urdu would be: *analogy, divergent, vocabulary, summarized, based, translated, post, **different, conversational, technical, transliterated, *and *script.

*So that conversational Urdu and Hindi would be 95% the same, but a technical journal would only be 25% the same (if transliterated using the same script). And written Urdu and written Persian would be like written English and written French.


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## Lugubert

panjabigator said:


> The title slips me now, but there is an excellent book on the subject called something like "One script: Two languages."


Christopher R. King: _One language, two scripts_. OUP, ISBN 019 565 112X. Recommended.

I've seen the Lord's prayer translated into 'Urdu' and 'Hindi'. They coincided in just two or three words. That's the way it gets when "purists" are let loose on both sides. On the other hand, there is an infinite number of sentences that you can't label as one and not the other. I had a native teacher in a Hindi course in India who wasn't perfectly sure that she spoke Hindi and not Urdu.

The differences are mainly in the vocabulary. Urdu draws on Arabic and Persian to a large extent, while Hindi sometimes strives at looking like Sanskrit. One of the few conspicuous differences in grammar that I've found is that Urdu quite often uses a Perso-Arabic genetive (P izaafat, A iDaafa): hukuumat-e-paakistaan 'the Government of Pakistan' instead of Hindi (and Urdu!) paakistaan kii hukuumat.

The 'mispronunciations' referred to by panjabigator might be cases where for example an Arabic or Persian word has a [z] - sometimes written ज़ and pronounced [z] in Hindi, but as often given as ज [j]. There are a few more under the same principle.



			
				vince said:
			
		

> So that conversational Urdu and Hindi would be 95% the same, but a technical journal would only be 25% the same (if transliterated using the same script). And written Urdu and written Persian would be like written English and written French.


Despite my degree in engineering, I haven't dared to look at technical texts in any of those languages yet. But from my humble experience, the structure of Persian has a slight resemblance to other Indo-European languages, but Urdu/Hindi features a verbal system that's hard to describe and looks like nothing else.

Formally, it's easy. The seven irregular verbs are regular, too, but in a slightly different way. Inflections are almost as rare as in Afrikaans. But the way they pile verbs at the end of sentences! Very useful to explain subtle differences like that an action occurs suddenly or gradually, is completed or ongoing etc. but way more elaborated than the Russian perfect/imperfect system. I'm afraid that you have to grow up with it to use it to its full extent, but hope that it is possible to learn to understand it.


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## panjabigator

I am happy to see another Hindi learner on the site!  





> I'm afraid that you have to grow up with it to use it to its full extent, but hope that it is possible to learn to understand it.


  Not necessarily true. You can definitely pick it up with practice and exposure.


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## cirrus

Where I live there are lots of people from N India and Pakistan. Conversations in the shops frequently start in Punjabi, shift to Hindi/Urdu with bits of English thrown in.


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## papillon

Say the president of Pakistan were to meet with the president of India. Would there be Urdu-Hindi translators on hand? The question relates not so much to the actual difference between the languages, but to the official perception of said difference. 
But, of course, after the official meeting is over and with the two dignitaries wanting to discuss a sensitive issue, would they be able to step aside and have a conversation (I mean in Hindi/Urdu, I'm sure they both speak English) without anyone present?


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## panjabigator

If the two country's presidents were to meet, I presume they would speak in English. It's what politicians over there use.  But if they were to use a language, it would be Urdu.  Why?  Because Indians know more Urdu than Pakistani's know Hindi.  This is due to the film industry (I'd say) and language purists who to create an identity for Hindi imported many words from Sanskrit.

My parents have conversed with Urdu speakers plenty of times and there were never issues.  Speakers, I believe, are aware of what words not to say.


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## MarcB

Nearly everyone in India and Pakistan has told me they are the same language, obviously the writing separates them as many people can only read one or the other. However there are quite a lot that can read both. Urdu is not a creole language as many of the loan words in Urdu are also part of Hindi. As previously mentioned Hindi has gone through a reform to add Sanskrit words but the two versions are mutually inteligible in the spoken form. As with all languages there are regionalisms and accent differences, but with little effort people even at the opposite end of the spectrum can at least make themselves understood.


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## panjabigator

MarcB said:


> Nearly everyone in India and Pakistan has told me they are the same language, obviously the writing separates them as many people can only read one or the other. However there are quite a lot that can read both. Urdu is not a creole language as many of the loan words in Urdu are also part of Hindi. As previously mentioned Hindi has gone through a reform to add Sanskrit words but the two versions are mutually inteligible in the spoken form. As with all languages there are regionalisms and accent differences, but with little effort people even at the opposite end of the spectrum can at least make themselves understood.



I agree 100%!  I'd add that in my opinion (according to my up bringing at least), Urdu sounds more refined/posh.  Urdu speakers have a great accent and every word sounds cristal clear.  It is also considered a very polite language.  I think this is due to the importation of words from Persian and Arabic, which for the most part have a great fluidity too them.  They are very euophonic.


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## Abbassupreme

Very interesting thread.  Now, I'm _pretty_ sure by now that this may very well be false, but I've heard that 80-85% of Urdu consists of Eastern Persian (Afghani Persian/Dari) loanwords.  Is this false?

Also (not that this necessarily pertains very closely to this discussion), I'd met an Afghan girl once (apparently fluent in Dari, though she was VERY reluctant to speak to me in it, as well as Urdu and Arabic) who told me that she'd learned Punjabi in a span of a few months through merely conversing with her Punjabi-speaking friends! :O  However, I was with her when she'd met this group of Indians, and she was either reluctant to pursue a conversation with them in her and their respective and apparently mutually intelligible languages or she was genuinely unable to.  Go figure.

Just throwin' that out there . . . . . . oh, what the hell.  Here's a question:
How similar is Punjabi to Hindi Urdu and (wait for it) Persian?  I'm thinking of taking up Urdu sometime in the future once I tackle my current inability to read and write Persian with sufficien proficiency.  Would Urdu be the recommended first step into learning more of the Eastern Indo-European languages?


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## panjabigator

Punjabi is to Urdu what Portuguese is to Spanish.  There are some similarities here and there, but Urdu is much more similar to Persian.  

Urdu poetry may be 80% Persian but I deem it to be far less in spoken.


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## avok

*The mutual intelligibility between the languages you mention is somewhat like the mutual intelligibility between Norwegian and Danish *


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## panjabigator

Yes as long as we keep the word "somewhat."


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## Lugubert

Abbassupreme said:


> How similar is Punjabi to Hindi Urdu and (wait for it) Persian? I'm thinking of taking up Urdu sometime in the future once I tackle my current inability to read and write Persian with sufficien proficiency. Would Urdu be the recommended first step into learning more of the Eastern Indo-European languages?


I know very little Hindi, and even less of those other languages, but having had more than just a cursory glance at them, 


			
				panjabigator said:
			
		

> Punjabi is to Urdu what Portuguese is to Spanish.


seems to be a good analogy. From what I've seen, languages like Gujarati, Bengali, Nepali look much more different from Hindi.

As stated earlier in the thread, especially spoken Hindi and spoken Urdu qualify as the same language.

Having had a year of Hindi and a year of Arabic, I thought Persian would be easy. Familiarity with the script and some Arabic vocabulary plus a neighbouring IE language tricked me into taking a half-semester course in Persian. Was I wrong! It was quite a struggle. From what I remember, Persian grammar is generally closer to European IE languages than to Hindi/Urdu. An exception is the Arabic/Persian/Urdu genetive I have mentioned (P izaafat, A iDaafa).


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## cirrus

I wouldn't put the difference in the Spanish/ Portuguese category. Granted there are many similar roots of words and many are identical if not written similarly. The problems come when it comes to spoken language. The difference between pronunciation, particularly of the European forms of both languages, are really marked. A Portuguese speaker will understand most of what a Spaniard says wheareas a typical Spanish speaker will miss vital chunks of what the Portuguese speaker has said.  This difference gets wider the further south you go down Portugal.

Meanwhile what I see here - literally right on my street and in the park when I walk the dog every day - is that Urdu and Hindi speakers can and do make sense to each other. If the two weren't mutually intelligible, just think what impact it would have on Bollywood - an industry which thrives on really mixing up its idioms.


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## Abbassupreme

Lugubert said:


> Having had a year of Hindi and a year of Arabic, I thought Persian would be easy. Familiarity with the script and some Arabic vocabulary plus a neighbouring IE language tricked me into taking a half-semester course in Persian. Was I wrong! It was quite a struggle. )


 
I'm not surprised. Only (MAXIMUM) 40% of Persian consists of Arabic loanwords, some of which aren't used by Arabs, anymore. Anyway, Perso-Arabic is an EXTREMELY difficult script to master, much more difficult BY FAR than the Arabic script of the Arabs. Anyway, the present tense in Persian is chock-full of irregular verbs, and so the only way to learn them is through memorization. Which Persian were you learning, anyway (in terms of the spoken form)? Yeah . . . . written Persian can be quite a hassle.


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## Nikola

cirrus said:


> I wouldn't put the difference in the Spanish/ Portuguese category. Granted there are many similar roots of words and many are identical if not written similarly. The problems come when it comes to spoken language. The difference between pronunciation, particularly of the European forms of both languages, are really marked. A Portuguese speaker will understand most of what a Spaniard says wheareas a typical Spanish speaker will miss vital chunks of what the Portuguese speaker has said. This difference gets wider the further south you go down Portugal.
> 
> Meanwhile what I see here - literally right on my street and in the park when I walk the dog every day - is that Urdu and Hindi speakers can and do make sense to each other. If the two weren't mutually intelligible, just think what impact it would have on Bollywood - an industry which thrives on really mixing up its idioms.


He said unjabi is to Urdu what Portuguese is to Spanish. NOt Hindi/Urdu.


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## panjabigator

> A Portuguese speaker will understand most of what a Spaniard says wheareas a typical Spanish speaker will miss vital chunks of what the Portuguese speaker has said. This difference gets wider the further south you go down Portugal.



Panjabi speakers will understand Hindi perfectly, but not the other way around.



> Meanwhile what I see here - literally right on my street and in the park when I walk the dog every day - is that Urdu and Hindi speakers can and do make sense to each other. If the two weren't mutually intelligible, just think what impact it would have on Bollywood - an industry which thrives on really mixing up its idioms.



I chat with my friends in "Urdu" everyday and there has never been an issue!


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## cirrus

Nikola said:


> He said unjabi is to Urdu what Portuguese is to Spanish. NOt Hindi/Urdu.



A haa! So my mistake then: repeats to self (whilst almost blushing) read the post properly rather than glancing!


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## macta123

Hindi and Urdu (atleast colloquially) are very mutually inteligible. Because, mostly in North India we use Hindustani which a dialectal mix of Hindi and Urdu based dialect/language.

If the Urdu speeking people use a highly purified form of their language, then a Hindi only learnt guy may have a little tough time. But, he can get the whole idea globally(and that too comparatively easily).

Hindi and Urdu are both formed in India. Urdu became national language of Pakistan after partition. And, India accepted Hindi. 

But, the language which we normally dot as Hindi (is an admixture called Hindustani - @ least the spoken form in many parts of North India )

In some states... there is large population who prefer speaking in more standardised Hindi.

But, normally it is Hindustani ( Hindi + Urdu ) which is common!


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## Lugubert

panjabigator said:


> Panjabi speakers will understand Hindi perfectly, but not the other way around.


Do you think that this reflects the level of Panjabi speakers' exposure to Hindi vs. the amount of Panjabi an average Hindi speaker encounters, or is there another explanation?


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## Lugubert

Abbassupreme said:


> I'm not surprised. Only (MAXIMUM) 40% of Persian consists of Arabic loanwords, some of which aren't used by Arabs, anymore. Anyway, Perso-Arabic is an EXTREMELY difficult script to master, much more difficult BY FAR than the Arabic script of the Arabs.


Indeed, above all in trying to write what you hear. Which of several letters should i use for the [z] I hear etc.


> Anyway, the present tense in Persian is chock-full of irregular verbs, and so the only way to learn them is through memorization.


So true. I sometimes wished for a system like Hindi, where even the seven irregular verbs are regular, but in a slightly different way. But then Hindi excels in other ways to complicate life for the poor learner... 


> Which Persian were you learning, anyway (in terms of the spoken form)? Yeah . . . . written Persian can be quite a hassle.


Distance learning, so little chance to try spoken language. I suppose several text were from children's books. I especially remember a text on bees, which managed to get most biological things wrong, and a delightful fable on an old lady who sheltered an assortment of talking animals (*پيره زن *).


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## panjabigator

Lugubert said:


> Do you think that this reflects the level of Panjabi speakers' exposure to Hindi vs. the amount of Panjabi an average Hindi speaker encounters, or is there another explanation?



Yes it definitely does.  Since Hindi is the national language, everyone has to learn it, and I believe that in the Panjab, children learn to write in Devanagari  before they learn Gurumukhi  (Panjabi's script).  I also like to draw parallals to Portuguese, which like Panjabi, is richer in sounds (tonal), so the average Panjabi speaker would recognize Hindi phonetics.


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## MarX

Lugubert said:


> Christopher R. King: _One language, two scripts_. OUP, ISBN 019 565 112X. Recommended.
> 
> I've seen the Lord's prayer translated into 'Urdu' and 'Hindi'. They coincided in just two or three words. That's the way it gets when "purists" are let loose on both sides. On the other hand, there is an infinite number of sentences that you can't label as one and not the other. I had a native teacher in a Hindi course in India who wasn't perfectly sure that she spoke Hindi and not Urdu.
> 
> The differences are mainly in the vocabulary. Urdu draws on Arabic and Persian to a large extent, while Hindi sometimes strives at looking like Sanskrit. One of the few conspicuous differences in grammar that I've found is that Urdu quite often uses a Perso-Arabic genetive (P izaafat, A iDaafa): hukuumat-e-paakistaan 'the Government of Pakistan' instead of Hindi (and Urdu!) paakistaan kii hukuumat.
> 
> The 'mispronunciations' referred to by panjabigator might be cases where for example an Arabic or Persian word has a [z] - sometimes written ज़ and pronounced [z] in Hindi, but as often given as ज [j]. There are a few more under the same principle.
> 
> 
> Despite my degree in engineering, I haven't dared to look at technical texts in any of those languages yet. But from my humble experience, the structure of Persian has a slight resemblance to other Indo-European languages, but Urdu/Hindi features a verbal system that's hard to describe and looks like nothing else.
> 
> Formally, it's easy. The seven irregular verbs are regular, too, but in a slightly different way. Inflections are almost as rare as in Afrikaans. But the way they pile verbs at the end of sentences! Very useful to explain subtle differences like that an action occurs suddenly or gradually, is completed or ongoing etc. but way more elaborated than the Russian perfect/imperfect system. I'm afraid that you have to grow up with it to use it to its full extent, but hope that it is possible to learn to understand it.



There are interesting parallels concerning the languages in Greater Panjab and Southeast Asia:

1. In Pakistan, Urdu was chosen to be the official language although only a small minority spoke it as their mother tongue at the time of independence.
The same goes for Hindu Panjabis who preferred Hindi.
In Indonesia, despite the fact that there were languages which numerically were far superior to Malay (like Javanese), Indonesians opted for Malay nevertheless, which developed to be Indonesian.

2. The difference between Hindu & Urdu is comparable to Malaysian & Indonesian. Indonesian uses loads of words and constructions from regional languages, like Javanese, whereas Malaysians.. I don't really know where they take their loanwords from . In any way, Malaysians sometimes sound to me as if they were speaking Indonesian with a Chinese accent.
In spite of all the differences, it's hard to draw the linguistical boundary between Indonesian and Malaysian, some words common in Malaysia may not be part of the de facto standard Indonesian based on the speech of Jakarta, but they may be used frequently in areas in Sumatra, Kalimantan, or other islands.

3. The [z] sound is often rendered to [j] in Indonesian. 

A main contrast between Hindi-Urdu and Malaysian-Indonesian is that the latter use the same script, whose spellings even became closer through the reform sometime in the seventies (or sixties?? I'm not sure).



panjabigator said:


> Punjabi is to Urdu what Portuguese is to Spanish.  There are some similarities here and there, but Urdu is much more similar to Persian.
> 
> Urdu poetry may be 80% Persian but I deem it to be far less in spoken.


Urdu is much more similar to Persian than it is to Panjabi??


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## lcfatima

I think just for chatting and conversing the two languages are essentially the same and variations seen just seem regional. I mean, even Urdu sounds different from Karachi to Lahore to Hyderbad in India, and Bombay and Delhi Hindi sound quite different. The accents are so distinct that u hear them straight away. But essentially just on a spoken level they are mainly the same. In my daily life I communicate with both Urdu and Hindi speakers and I really don't alter my language much. Just occasionally some word comes up that causes confusion, and those are usually religious words or something. Like my neighbor told me she is doing a head shaving ceremony for her baby and I didn't get the word for that ceremony. Stuff like that.

The differences mostly come into play when the languages are used for formal purposes. News papers, news casts, speeches, etc, anywhere where one would find formal language...you know all the big educated sounding words, those would all be said with a Persio-Arabic lexicon in Urdu, and with a Sanskrit based lexicon in Hindi. Since the spread of Hindu nationalism, I think Sanskritized Hindi has become more and more common. For example, before in Hindi films one would find a lot of Persio-Arabic words, but nowadays you hear a lot more "shuddh" Hindi words.

In Hindi, one has to be educated to have these sophisticated Sanskrit words down. This makes it difficult for uneducated people to understand the news and so forth. Also, if you walked around in India saying these Sanskritized words to shop keepers and taxi drivers, you would sound weird. So I think the common language is still not so Sanskritized. 

Personally I think teaching the language on a lower level should be done in a combined Hindi and Urdu class where students have to learn both nastaliq and devnagri and then the higher level words should be introduced later in seperate Hindi or Urdu classes when students have the basic grammar and a firm vocabulary of the many, many common words.


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## achax

Urdu and Hindi are in fact the same spoken language with different loan words. Punjabi is a regional language that is as different from Hindi/Urdu as say, Portuguese is from Castilian Spanish.

However, it must be understood that Hindi/Urdu is spoken everyday only by literate/educated people or Urdu speaking Muslims (even if illiterate).

Illiterate and poorly educated Hindus from all except the immediate vicinity of Delhi (only in UP, not Haryana) actually speak regional dialects which are as distant from Hindi/Urdu as say, Punjabi is. For example, the term "What happened" is:

Kya Hua in Hindi and Urdu; but 
Ki Bhel in Maithili dialect of East Bihar;
Ka Bhoil in Bhojpuri of West Bihar;
Ka Hoi Gawah in Awadhi
Kay Hoyo in Haryana/East Rajastahan
Kaee Hoyo in West Rajasthan; and
Ki Hoya in Panjabi, so as you can see, Panjabi is actually closer to Hindi/Urdu in this and many other examples than the other dialects of so-called Hindi speaking people.


Persian is a completely different language, whichever version you use although there are a few (very few) sentences which are very similar. Eg

"I bought this book in the market today" would be

"Main imroz in kitab ra dar bazaar kharidem" in Persian; and

"Main is roz is kitab ko bazaar se kharida" in Urdu (comprehensible to a Hindi speaker, and

"Main aaj is kitab ko bazaar se kharida" in Hindi

You can see the clear similarities but such sentences are very few.

Indians are more familiar with Urdu than Pakistanis are with Sanskritised Hindi as there are no Hindi speakers in Pakistan while there are over 100 million Urdu speaking people in India. Indeed, the purest Urdu is spoken in North India, especially in the part of UP between Delhi and Lucknow.


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## Illuminatus

I agree with Icfatima. The day to day language uses lots of loan words and the use of native Sanskrit words (called _Tatsam_ words) would sound pompous and official. However, if we are asked to write an essay or deliver a speech, we will automatically switch to the Sanskritized version (many of us would actually have to hunt for the _proper_ words!)


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## timboleicester

What an intersing thread. I often met people from Gujarati backgrounds in my native city of Leicester. They often say that they can speak Urdu and Hindi and count these as two languages. My Gujarati teacher from my school says that they are really the same language. We had a Punjabi teacher too and he had to speak either English to the Gujarati teacher or (you guessed it) Hindi which is the lingua franca along with English in India.

I learnt persian as i grew up with iranians and let me tell you I can't follow or make myslef understood to Urdu or Hindi speakers although there are a lot of shared vocabulary. I remember the Punjabi teacher being amazed that the word for binoculars (dur-bin) was the same in both farsi and punjabi. He didn't know that the word dur means far and bin was from didan = to see. At least he said he didn't.

I am stuck in Madrid at the moment and I have realised that with no spanish I can't stand it another day and will b heading to France or UK tomorrow.


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## BP.

I've been conversing with some Hindi speakers and had have to simplify my expression so they could understand. In the beginning, some commented on how 'fluid', 'beautiful' and 'formal'(to them) some Urdu words were, but there's no point if they can't be understood by the two parties in conversation.


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## Lugubert

timboleicester said:


> What an intersing thread. I often met people from Gujarati backgrounds in my native city of Leicester. They often say that they can speak Urdu and Hindi and count these as two languages. My Gujarati teacher from my school says that they are really the same language. We had a Punjabi teacher too and he had to speak either English to the Gujarati teacher or (you guessed it) Hindi which is the lingua franca along with English in India.
> 
> I learnt persian as i grew up with iranians and let me tell you I can't follow or make myslef understood to Urdu or Hindi speakers although there are a lot of shared vocabulary. I remember the Punjabi teacher being amazed that the word for binoculars (dur-bin) was the same in both farsi and punjabi. He didn't know that the word dur means far and bin was from didan = to see. At least he said he didn't.


One of my Hindi teachers in Mussoorie didn't dare to tell us if she was teaching us Hindi or Urdu. Anyway, the language worked in town.

Then, knowing a little Hindi and some Arabic vocabulary, I thought that acquiring Persian, being geographically and, I thought, in some ways linguistically, between those languages, would be a breeze. Far from. Persian has its very own learning problems, not resembling features of other languages I have tried.

For communicating, it's amazing what a little understanding of culture can do. Greeting a Muslim in an area where Hindi dominates using Arabic/Persian/Urdu _Salaam_ instead of _Namaste_, or anywhere _Sat sri akal_ to a Sikh, opens up doors.


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## Rjarjun

Hindi and Urdu is basically the same language. Urdu is = Hindi + Turkish/Pashto & some words of Arabic also. Hindi and Urdu can be called dialects of the same language. A speaker of Hindi generally can understand spoken Urdu, but he may come across a problem when many complex Urdu words are used, but that aside, understanding the gist of spoken Urdu is easy. A comparision of Hindi and Urdu can be like comparing Spanish spoken in Spain and Spanish spoken in the Latin American countries. Reading Urdu is not possible without education in the script because Urdu is written in Persian/Arabic script. 

I personally believe and it has also been said in India that Hindi and Urdu have been described as different languages because of political reasons.


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## Rjarjun

Hindi and Urdu are basically the same language given different names because of political reasons. Many "Hindi" movies are made each year with about half a dozen songs in each of them. A large number of these songs are actually Urdu and not Hindi and the listeners won't even make the difference. They will call it a Hindi song while actually it is completely Urdu. 

As regards the spoken language, Urdu is more courteous than Hindi and generally the large proportion of people speak something called "Hindustani" which is a creole of Hindi and Urdu without even realising it. A conversation between a person speaking Hindi and Urdu will generally easy but a Hindi speaker may have to clarify some high level Urdu words if he is not familiar with them.


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