Hindustani
[key], subdivision of the Indic group of the Indo-Iranian languages, which
themselves form a subfamily of the Indo-European family of languages. Some
authorities define Hindustani as the spoken form of Hindi and Urdu. Others prefer to call Hindi and Urdu
written varieties of Hindustani. The term Hindustani can
also be used to include some vernacular dialects of northern India. Hindi is
the variety of Hindustani used by Hindus; it is also the official language
of India. Written in the Devanagari alphabet employed for Sanskrit, Hindi is read from left to
right and has a vocabulary that is strictly Indic. Urdu, on the other hand,
is the form of Hindustani used by Muslims and is official in Pakistan; it is
written in a modified form of the Arabic alphabet, is read from right to
left, and has added a number of words borrowed from Arabic and Persian to
its originally Indic vocabulary. Despite these differences, both Hindi and
Urdu are written variants of the same Indic subdivision, Hindustani. The
latter goes back to the Prakrits or vernacular dialects of classical
Sanskrit (see Indo-Iranian) and
has been greatly influenced by Sanskrit itself. The grammar of Hindustani is
much simpler than that of the older Indic tongues, such as Sanskrit. For
instance, the neuter gender, the dual number, and the old case endings for
the noun have been discarded. The conjugation of the verb has also been
greatly simplified. Instead of prepositions, Hindustani uses postpositions,
or particles placed after words to make clear their grammatical function or
relationship. Hindustani plays an important role in modern India as a
lingua franca;
the number of people who speak or understand Hindustani in India and
Pakistan has been variously estimated, but it likely exceeds 400
million
persons. Thus Hindustani ranks third in number of speakers, after Chinese
and English, among the world's language communities.
See G. H. Fairbanks and B. G. Misra, Spoken and Written Hindi (1966); A. Rai, A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi-Hindavi (1985).
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