Following English and Mandarin Chinese, Hindi is renowned for being the third most widely spoken language in the world, with around 650 million speakers globally.
What is less known to the non-Desi world, however, is that Hindi and Urdu are two sides of the same linguistic coin: part of the Indo-Aryan (a subset of the Indo-European) group of languages, they share the exact same grammatical structure and, at the beginner level, over 70-80% of the vocabulary. In fact, before the British partition of India, the spoken language of Hindi and Urdu was often collectively referred to as “Hindustani”.
Hindi and Urdu are descended from Khari Boli, a language spoken in and around Delhi in North India roughly in the 9th and 10th centuries. When Persian-speaking Turks overran the Punjab and Gangetic plains—a large swath of land in Northern India–in the early 11th century, they referred to Khari Boli as Hindavi (i.e., the language of Hind, the land of the Indus River). Constructed largely from Sanskrit loanwords, Hindavi gradually absorbed Persian and, subsequently, Arabic loanwords, resulting in a mixed language that these newly arrived Turkish immigrants and the resident native population of North India used to communicate.
However, over eight hundred years later, during the course of the 19th century, Hindavi split into Hindi (representing a Sanskrit bias) and Urdu (representing a Persian one). The 1947 partition of India, in particular, solidified this divide: Hindustani—along with two million people—was caught in the crossfire. Aside from each new nation choosing its national language (with India choosing Hindi and Pakistan choosing Urdu), burgeoning nationalist ideologies encouraged linguistic purism. Hindi purged itself of its Perso-Arabic influence, whereas Urdu removed itself from Sanskrit (in its standard written form, at least).
Hindi’s script devanāgarī (देवनागरी) is developed from Sanskrit and is written from left-to-right:
Oppositely, Urdu’s script urdū ḥurūf-i tahajjī (ردُو حُرُوفِ تَہَجِّی) is derived from Persian and Arabic and is written from right-to-left:
Hindi and Urdu’s contemporary statuses are inseparable reflections of one another. There isn’t a hard split between religion, area, and language: contrary to expectations (or, perhaps, not surprisingly at all), many Muslims speak Hindi, many Hindus speak Urdu, many Pakistanis speak Hindi, and many Indians speak Urdu. Although Hindi and Urdu share everyday vernacular, they have very different scripts and literary styles.
This concept is so foreign for native English speakers: to be able to completely converse with someone, yet only realize that they speak a different language altogether through more advanced vocabulary or writing. Yet, for hundreds of millions of people around the world, this linguistic and cultural idiosyncrasy is reality. Whether regarded as Hindi, Urdu, or Hindustani, language is a core facet of identity, and these speakers know this better than anyone.