Hindi-Urdu

Hindi-Urdu

Hindustani (हिन्दुस्तानी, ہندوستانی, Hindustānī, literally: "of Hindustan"), is an Indo-Aryan language and the lingua franca of North India and Pakistan. and known historically, as Hindavi or Rekhta. It derives primarily from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi, and incorporates a large amount of vocabulary from Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit and Turkic. It is a pluricentric language, with two official forms, Standard Hindi and Standard Urdu, which are standardized registers of it. The colloquial languages are all but indistinguishable, and even the official standards are nearly identical in grammar, though they differ in literary conventions and in academic and technical vocabulary, with Urdu retaining stronger Persian, Central Asian and Arabic influences, and Hindi relying more heavily on Sanskrit. Before the Partition of British India, the terms Hindustani, Urdu, and Hindi were synonymous; all covered what would be called Urdu and Hindi today. The term Hindustani is still used for the colloquial language and lingua franca of India and Pakistan, for example for the language of Bollywood films, as well as for several quite different varieties of Hindi spoken outside of the Subcontinent, such as Fijian Hindustani and the Caribbean Hindustani of Suriname and Trinidad.