Hindustani vocabulary

Hindustani, also known as Hindi-Urdu, like all Indo-Aryan languages, has a core base of Sanskrit-derived vocabulary, which it gained through Prakrit.^[1] As such the standardized registers of the Hindustani language (Hindi-Urdu) share a common vocabulary, especially on the colloquial level.^[2] However, in formal contexts, Modern Standard Hindi tends to draw on Sanskrit, while Standard Urdu turns to Persian and sometimes Arabic.^[3] This difference lies in the history of Hindustani, in which the lingua franca started to gain more Persian words in urban areas (such as Delhi, Lucknow and Hyderabad), under the Delhi Sultanate; this dialect came to be termed Urdu.^[4][5]

The original Hindi dialects continued to develop alongside Urdu and according to Professor Afroz Taj, "the distinction between Hindi and Urdu was chiefly a question of style. A poet could draw upon Urdu's lexical richness to create an aura of elegant sophistication, or could use the simple rustic vocabulary of dialect Hindi to evoke the folk life of the village. Somewhere in the middle lay the day to day language spoken by the great majority of people. This day to day language was often referred to by the all-encompassing term Hindustani."^[5] In Colonial India, Hindi-Urdu acquired vocabulary introduced by Christian missionaries from the Germanic and Romanic languages, e.g. pādrī (Devanagari: पादरी, Nastaleeq: پادری) from padre, meaning pastor.^[6]

When describing the state of Hindi-Urdu under the British Raj, Professor Śekhara Bandyopādhyāẏa stated that "Truly speaking, Hindi and Urdu, spoken by a great majority of people in north India, were the same language written in two scripts; Hindi was written in Devanagari script and therefore had a greater sprinkling of Sanskrit words, while Urdu was written in Persian script and thus had more Persian and Arabic words in it. At the more colloquial level, however, the two languages were mutually intelligible."^[7] After the partition of India, political forces within India tried to further Sanskritize Hindi,^[8] while political forces in Pakistan campaigned to remove Prakit/Sanskrit derived words from Urdu and supplant them with Persian and Arabic words.^[9] Despite these government efforts, the film industry, Bollywood continues to release its films in the original Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) language, easily understood and enjoyed by speakers of both registers;^[10] in addition, many of the same television channels are viewed across the border.^[11] In modern times, a third variety of Hindustani with significant English influences has also appeared, which is sometimes called Hinglish or Urdish.^{[12][13][14][15][16]}