Talk:Hindustani language/Archive 4

Are the tags still needed?
Do the tags at the top of the page still serve any purpose? Besides silly (and repeatedly debunked) claims like this language is dead or doesn't exist, they all seem to center around the name of the article, which is another matter, or about the accuracy of the map, which is not a problem with the entire article. Besides the name, there seems to be an issue with Fowler not understanding the difference between MSH and the Hindi belt, so he doesn't understand why Hindustani (the basis of MSH) would cover a smaller area of the map than the Hindi Belt, which under some definitions includes Rajasthani and Bihari, which are "Hindi" but not Hindustani. But regardless, that's not an issue with the entire article. — kwami (talk) 20:02, 13 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Remove the tags immediately and unconditionally. Virtually all issues are based on erroneous assumptions which were clarified with citations from reliable sources in the ensuing discussion. What remains, is the contestation that "Hindustani" is not the appropriate label form the language covered in this article and its size-splits ("Hindustani grammar", "Hindustani phonology" etc.), and should be moved to "Hindi-Urdu". I suggest a clean start with a new page move discussion, provided that the tags disappear, and that all participants agree that any disruptive behavior—including insults which have flavored the previous discussion—immediately go to WP:ANI. –Austronesier (talk) 20:23, 13 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Fogstar: maybe, Hindustani can a old version of Urdu, but it belongs to Western Hindi.

Linguistic definition of Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu)
Academic linguists define the Hindustani language, also known as Hindi-Urdu, as the lingua franca of the northern Indian subcontinent, which has two standard registers, Hindi and Urdu. A plethora of references corroborate this. Work in India, authored by Daniel Ratheiser and published by Knowledge Must, states:

Principles of Historical Linguistics, authored by Hans Henrich Hock and published by Walter de Gruyter, states:

Arun Kolatkar and Literary Modernism in India, authored by Laetitia Zecchini and published by A & C Black, states:

The Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of the World, published by Elsevier, states:

Encyclopaedia Britannica states:

Urdu Through Hindi: Nastaliq With the Help of Devanagari, authored by Afroz Taj and published by Rangmahal Press, states:

The Rhetoric of Hindutva, authored by Manisha Basu and published by Cambridge University Press, states:

Though much of what is said here is common knowledge to those familiar with the history of Hindustani/Hindi-Urdu, I have added these sources here should anyone find them helpful to reference in the near future. I hope this helps. With regards, AnupamTalk 00:13, 21 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Yes, Fowler keeps insisting that the name "Hindustani" is obsolete, but I notice that both Glottolog and Ethnologue use it in preference to 'Hindi-Urdu'. Glottolog includes Fiji Hindi under that name, and Ethnologue includes Sansi. Ethn. says, "Hindustani ... refers here to the unofficial lingua franca of northwest India," whereas "Literary Hindi, or Hindi-Urdu, has 4 varieties: Hindi (High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, Literary Hindi, standard Hindi); Urdu [urd]; Dakhini; Rekhta." In other words (according to Ethn.), "Hindi-Urdu" is the set of literary standards, while "Hindustani" is the language as a whole. ELL2 also uses 'Hindustani' rather than 'Hindi-Urdu' as the name of the language. — kwami (talk) 11:09, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Ethnologue is about the near-extinct languages, the local ones.  It has never been about major languages.  They say that themselves in their second clarification about How not to use Ethnologue: "While we continue to track major languages and are making efforts to make our reporting on all languages complete, concise, and consistent, we recognize that the world's major languages have been and continue to be much more thoroughly studied and described in academia, whereas the lesser-known languages continue to be under-documented. One of the strengths of the Ethnologue is its focused attention on those lesser-known languages; less emphasis is given to keeping up with published studies about major languages.'"  The major scholars of South Asian linguistics have pronounced the usage "Hindustani" obsolete.  See the evidence in my section above.  They are all major linguists or sociolinguists, not the kind of random sources compiled immediately above.   Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  23:28, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Fowler, you're grossly exaggerating and outright misrepresenting your sources to justify your existing POV, and ignoring views that disagree with your own even as you quote them.
 * True, Shapiro at least does say the name 'Hindustani' is obsolete, but that is countered by the reliable sources that continue to use it, such as the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics and indeed many of your own sources. Salomon in his letter to the NYT says the language is now called 'Hindi', but that is obviously not acceptable to Muslims. (You have objected to minimizing the Muslim component of the language. Do you truly want to say that the national language of Pakistan is 'Hindi'?) Barz says the name is obsolete because we must now to choose between 'Hindi' and 'Urdu', but of course we don't have to do any such thing. The rest of your sources contradict your claim. — kwami (talk) 00:14, 24 February 2020 (UTC)
 * User:Kwamikagami, if there is an attempt to singlehandedly interject communalistic and nationalistic political perspectives into this article and other Hindustani/Hindi-Urdu articles, this section I created will serve as great reference for individuals to see the neutral and academic perspective on the Hindustani/Hindi-Urdu language. Feel free to add additional sources here if you'd like. I hope this helps. With regards, AnupamTalk 23:49, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Kwami, the mention of Salomon's letter was a humorous aside. It was meant to show that it had appeared even in humorous newspaper columns.  As for where Hindustani fits, linguists themselves are not clear, whether it is a loose-knit language or a style in a continuum of styles we call Hindi-Urdu.  Does it include the language of low-brow newspapers, of casual conversations of the literate, or only that of the less literate street?  The language corpora are more or less nonexistent.  How a colloquial spoken language of the street gets to have an Orthography section which addresses not even the simplest (and I mean Jamaat 1) topics of diagraphia in the scripts, of the redundant consonant symbols in Urdu, of an incomplete set of vowels, whose diacritics no one uses, is anybody's guess.  Whom is the script section for, then?  Is it supposed to be the script of the low-brow-est of Urdu newspapers?  If so, very few Hindi speakers will understand the content even if it is written in Roman.   I'm trying to understand the larger issues in Hindi-Urdu scholarship.  I'm in no hurry.  The important thing for me is to understand.  I'm not editing the page, am I?  Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  20:18, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Dehlavi or Kauravi?
A couple editors now have changed the base of the language from Dehlavi to Kauravi. I've reverted them, but thought I should check here. Both have been called "Khariboli" -- could that be the point of confusion? — kwami (talk) 10:57, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Kwami, In the opinion of linguists, the colloquial Hindi-Urdu lingua franca—whether you call it Hindustani or not—arose as a result of the Muslim conquest of North India. The lingua franca initially had only a small proportion of Khari boli, a much greater of Braj bhasa, Haryanvi, even Punjabi.  It took three centuries of Muslim rule for the Khari boli to reach a critical mass of linguistic dominance, and it did not happen until the waning of rule of the Mughals in the 18th century.  That point needs to be made; otherwise, it is meaningless to say Hindustani was historically called Hindawi.  Any look at Ameer Khusrow's poetry, which was written in Persian and Hindawi,  will tell you that it had Braj bhasa not Khari boli.  Here Khusrow's famous ghazal Zihal e miskeen mukun taghaful.   Which vaunted speaker of the Bollywood's broken Hindustani will have even the slightest clue what words mean?  The linguistic nationalism in India in relation to Pakistan and the competing sub-nationalisms within India, make it so that everyone claims that the lingua franca belongs to their special subregion, but are blind to the 800-pound gorilla in the room, the Muslims, without whom there would have been no lingua franca, and without whom the special language of the Khari boli subregion (between Delhi and Muzaffarnagar) would have remained nothing but a vernacular curiosity.     Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  14:01, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Btw, I see you have done good work on the Hindi dab page. The map is not accurate.  You'd be better off adding Grierson's map (on which all these Wikipedia maps are based on anyway) which I uploaded this past December.  See File:Prevailing Languages Imperial Gazetteer of India 1909.jpg  The Hindustani region is the upper Doab (Persian "do" = two; "aab" = water, the tongue of land, or the interfluve, between the Ganges and Yamuna rivers).  Delhi lies on the southwestern end of this region.   Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  14:20, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * You can see the upper doab in a map I uploaded years ago: File:DoabUnitedProvincesIGI1908.jpg Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  17:11, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Those are good points, and we should try to work them in. Though a bit ironic you use the term 'Khari Boli' when that may be part of the problem -- do you mean Dehlavi?

I didn't make the map, and am not about to try to correct it. We can add the other map as well or replace it if we have a good substitute. — kwami (talk) 23:47, 25 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Here is an example of Khari boli as spoken in Delhi and therefore Dehlvi. This is an example of Khari boli spoken somewhere northeast of Delhi.  The Khari boli region extends from Delhi at its southwestern end to Muzaffarnagar at the northeast end.  Some people extend it farther northeast.  (DSAL at Uchicago use to have Grierson's gramophone recordings, from the 1920s, which has some splendid examples of dialects in an around Delhi, but it has been disabled.)  I'm not sure about the grammatical differences, but Khari boli is a rougher sounding language, less lyrical, less sing-song that Braj or Awadhi, the two ther major Hindi dialects.   Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  00:05, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Here are examples of contemporary Braj bhasa and contemporary Awadhi Note that they lilt more, are more melodic,  than Khari boli.  In the views of many, especially in the old days, Khari boli sounds more  coarse, or crude, even uncouth.   Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  00:18, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Commons won't let me modify the map, even though they (falsely) attribute it to me. It looks like the difference between it and the range of Hindustani in Grierson is what is called Haryanvi in the thumb at right. Is there something specific wrong with that? — kwami (talk) 00:16, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * It seems to have too much East-West range. I'm not able to tell precisely because there are no markers such as rivers or names of towns; it does have faint modern-day national boundaries. Grierson (for obvious reasons) doesn't have those. I'll look for other maps. I probably have other British-era maps lying around.   Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  00:32, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I figured out the problem. The eastern end of the Hindustani (or, in Grierson, "Hindostani") range should extend no farther east than Cape Comorin, the very bottom of India.  In the Wikipedia map it extends twice as far.   Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  04:17, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Urdu-in-Devanagari and other topics.
Thank you for spurring me to take a look at Rizwan Ahmad's Urdu-in-Devanagari paper, which can be read here. It had been poorly summed up in the article to suggest that books—selling 19 to a dozen in Old Delhi—had both the Arabic and the Devanagari scripts. Having bought such a bilingual Quran Majeed in Urdu Bazaar some 20 years ago, I am, of course, aware of this phenomenon, but it in no way means that "Hindustani" is one big happy family, in all its incarnations—especially Hindustani-as-Urdu, written equally in Hindi, English, or Perso-Arabic, sung to universal comprehension, not to mention adulation, in Bollywood songs—which seems the general POV behind this article. Ahmad's journal article says something more subtle. Young Muslim men in Old Delhi have taken to reading Arabic and Urdu texts in Devanagari, but with new orthographic conventions, such as employing the schwa, अ (which occurs in Hindi in only word-initial positions) in word-medial and word-final positions to represent the Urdu/Arabic letter ع or ain. That this is far from widespread practice, was demonstrated by a test given to (mostly Hindu) graduate students in Hindi literature at Jawaharlal Nehru University (one of India's premier) in New Delhi. 75% had not encountered this orthography before and thought it was alien to Devanagari. In other words, the Urdu-in-Devanagari among these Muslims was a way of keeping Urdu orthography alive in a subculture—by representing it in innovative ways in Devanagari—not an aspect of Hindustani's newfound cosmopolitanism. The article ends with a conclusion that echoes my earlier sentiments about the slow linguistic genocide of Urdu in India: "Finally, a word about the macro social and political contexts within which the orthographic practices discussed above are taking place is in order. The Indian Constitution not only gives minorities the right to maintain their languages and scripts but also obligates the states and local authorities to provide the necessary support and institutional structure for their maintenance and growth. These constitutional provisions notwithstanding, the Indian government has failed to create conditions—social, political, and educational—in which the language and script of the Muslim minority can survive and flourish. This gap between the beautiful constitutional provisions and the pathetic educational and linguistic realities on the ground clearly indicates that minority languages and scripts can become marginalized and eventually die out in the shadows of the very constitutions that claim to sustain them." Urdu, which was routinely taught in Government schools in the Urdu heartland of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh between 1858 and 1947 was removed more or less overnight after 1947. That has taken a toll in India. This article needs to be wary of seeing the picture through rose-tinted glasses, just because it is attempting to hold on to the POV that colloquial Hindi-Urdu is the real meat and everything else is gravy. Please try to keep needless POV out of this page. Fowler&amp;fowler «Talk»  22:30, 25 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Fowler, yes, we do need to be aware of the fraught political connotations, but in the end, this article is about a language -- not literacy, not domestic politics or minority rights, though of course all of those should inform the scope of the article. (Somewhere we note the use of अ with vowel diacritics for ayin, I believe.) Manak Hindi is Urdu. Urdu in turn is Hindi. Many speakers find one side of that or the other to be offensive, but a lot of people find reality to be offensive. Some people find it offensive that we're apes. Some people find it offensive that the world is round. I met someone (a native speaker) who was offended by the idea that English was a Germanic language -- he insisted that it was Romance. But as an encyclopedia, we don't pander to such people.


 * I don't think anyone's trying to minimize the communal and religious strife in India. The sometimes wearyingly interminable "Hindi and Urdu are the same language" passages are not there to promote a rosy view, but largely a (sometimes clumsy) attempt to counter POV warriors who are offended by that and are trying to minimize or censor it. Were more editors prepared to accept reality, we could more easily move on from defending reality to better covering the sociolinguistic issues that concern you. I mean, just look at the huge waste of time spent countering your earlier spurious arguments, with almost no net change. That time could've been spent improving this article. — kwami (talk) 22:53, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * No net change just means that the editors that edit this page have a different POV. I will eventually read enough sources to know where the scholarly consensus lies.  No worries, I will eventually get there.    Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  23:47, 25 February 2020 (UTC)
 * User:Fowler&fowler, this article exists to inform readers of what Hindustani/Hindi-Urdu is, from a linguistic perspective, not to shoehorn your political opinions on what you claim is the decline of Urdu in India (or conversely, the status of Hindi in Pakistan). All across the world, academic institutions offer Hindustani/Hindi-Urdu courses to teach students the language. This presentation provides a good overview for people who are unfamiliar with the language (also reflected here); the article as it stands now reflects the same and it will continue to do so. Cheers, AnupamTalk 00:12, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Fowler has some good points too, though. The national language of India is Urdu, and the modern language was forged in the Muslim conquest. There is a chronic attempt by Hindutva types to minimize the Persian element in the language and the Muslim element in the history, with such idiotic but frequently repeated claims as that MSH has been purged of its Arabic and Persian component, or that it's built on a dual Prakrit and Sanskrit base, when (AFAICT) what actually happened was that there was a shift from taking flowery language (and later academic jargon) from Persian to taking it from Sanskrit, while leaving the huge number assimilated Persian loans in place. I don't know the percentage of Persian in MSH, but it's high. In that way Hindustani is much like English, with its massive French component from the Norman conquest. Modern English wouldn't exist without its French component, and Modern Hindi wouldn't exist without its Persian component. — kwami (talk) 00:53, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * User:Kwamikagami, I do not disagree with anything you have just said. The forced supplantation of Persian loanwords from the literary MSH is deplorable (as is the coerced purging of native Prakitic words from MSU); most Indians and Pakistanis do not speak in these artificial literary registers, but rather, in colloquial Hindustani as it has been spoken for centuries. Hindustani did indeed develop during the period of Islamic administrative rule in India, as a result of cultural contact between Hindus and Muslims. The article's lede and history section currently reflects that, with plenty of references to support this information. You're completely correct in your comparison of Hindustani with English. I hope this helps. With regards, AnupamTalk 01:01, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Huh. I didn't realize Prakrit was being forced out as well. Do we make that point in the MSH article? It's interesting re. language politics, though I'm aware that the ideal MSH is an artificial construct that hardly anyone actually speaks. — kwami (talk) 01:28, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * User:Kwamikagami, the phenomenon is discussed in the MSH and MSU articles; the following text Education in Afghanistan: Developments, Influences and Legacies Since 1901 by Yahia Baiza (published by Routledge) provides a good summary of it:


 * The linguist Braj Kachru, notes, however, that "The style of Urdu, even in Pakistan, is changing from "high" Urdu to colloquial Urdu (more like Hindustani, which would have pleased M.K. Gandhi)." I hope this helps. With regards, AnupamTalk 01:39, 26 February 2020 (UTC)


 * I meant forcing out Prakrit words. I'd never heard of that before. — kwami (talk) 01:52, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * User:Kwamikagami, the Sanskrit/Prakritic element is viewed in the same way by communal activists; Gender, Sex, and the City: Urdu Rekhti Poetry in India, 1780-1870 by R. Vanita, published by Springer, states:


 * As such, this article is particularly important and we must continue to ensure that no communal rhetoric enters it. I hope this helps. With regards, AnupamTalk 02:00, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Anupam, please don't be patronizing by unloading a youtube video made by a doofus who can't even pronounce "Hindustani" and then repeating your canonical, "I hope this helps."  Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  02:59, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * User:Fowler&fowler, thank you for opening the presentation and watching it. I apologise if you didn't like the narrator's accent, though you should not fault him for it. Based on the presentation and articles that I provided, I trust that you are now aware of the neutral perspective on the Hindustani/Hindi-Urdu language that this article will continue to convey. Also, I wasn't being patronizing but rather, I tend to be polite when I speak in general; regardless, you shouldn't make such a request after having rudely accused people here of not being able to read Perso-Arabic (when this is not the case). I hope this helps. With regards, AnupamTalk 03:11, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Good video. I watched it again. It is amazing how precise and factual it is, shorn of all the political bullshit that pervades the Hindi-Urdu debates. -- Kautilya3 (talk) 04:37, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

I have watched the video now. Since it seems to regurgitating Wikipedia content, I won't say anything about it, for fear of upsetting anyone here. I will say that the Urdu pronunciation is not kwahish-mand but Kaahish-mand. In Urdu, the w is not pronounced in that word. Fowler&amp;fowler «Talk»  05:24, 26 February 2020 (UTC)
 * PS There are other errors in the video. In the British Raj, the language of small courts and small-town-administration had become Urdu, but what was displayed on the coins remained Persian (not Urdu).  Here is an example of a quarter rupee from the reign of Edward VII (during Victoria's long reign in the Raj, the coins had only English on both the obverse and the reverse; after Edward VII succeeded, it carried both Persian and English).  As you will see, it says "chahar ana" which is Persian, not Urdu (NB 16 anas made a rupeed, so 4 anas = 1/4 rupee). Here is another for a half rupee.  It says "hasht ana" (i.e. 8 anas in Persian)  I had made the same error myself when I added the British India rupee (on which it is Persian, but it is not evident as the Persian and Urdu are the same, "aik rupya.")  Also, in the video, there is an error in the second example.  The literary Hindi speaker will likely not use the word "haalaat."  That is an Arabic word, the -aat ending occurrsing in some Arabic origin words in Urdu (e.g akhbarat (for newspapers, though no one uses it; ittefaqat, ...)  The literary examples are somewhat artificial ones.   Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  14:52, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

- You're welcome. I'm glad you looked up for the paper, which is very interesting (more about it below). I have deleted the subsection for two reasons, as shortly explained my edit summary. I haven't checked the edit history that deeply, so I don't know who added the content, and I hope they won't take offense to my comments. But the section was written in a very blunt and bearish style, and resulted–intended or not–in a very condescending description of the Urdu-speaking community in India, instead of summarizing the actual content of the paper, which is a about an innovative and controversial strategy by Indian Urdu speakers to counter the decline of Urdu literacy. As such, the paper is in no way about "Hindustani" by any defintion, but about Urdu.

This WP article (plus various dependent articles such Hindustani grammar, Hindustani phonology etc.) is about the common linguistic ground of Hindi and Urdu. Hindi and Urdu are high literary registers based on a vernacular with a single structure, which is why technically, they represent the same language, whether you may call it "Hindustani" or "Hindi-Urdu".

But the sociolinguistic reality is more complex than that. Except maybe for a very small minority, current speakers self-indentify either as Urdu or as Hindi speakers. Even if they only have limited knowledge of the "high" vocabulary which primarily distinguishes Urdu and Hindi, or make limited use of it in their everday communication, being an Urdu or Hindi speaker is an essential part of their communal (and usually also socioreligious) identity. So we cannot simply dump every Hindi- and Urdu-related topic into this article because "Hindi and Urdu are the same, they're Hindustani". It does not reflect the sociolinguistic reality, nor does it not do justice to scholarly efforts such as Rizwan Ahmad's paper. No, the paper is not about "books that contain both Arabic and Devanagari versions of Hindustani". It is certainly worthy of inclusion in WP, but not here (it belongs in Urdu), and not butchered as it was in the deleted section.

A short note about the repeatedly cited notion of "linguistic genocide": "genocide" includes systematic homicide of a community or actions that will result in physical debilitation of a community with the intent of its extinction. "Linguistic genocide" is an inapproriate and provocative metaphor for something else: the eradication of a language, either directly by prohibition, repression etc. or indirectly by creating/tolerating a social climate where maintaining a language is preceived as a disadvantage for its speakers. In such a situation, no life is lost; tragic nonetheless, but to a different degree. I suggest not to use toxic vocabulary such as "linguistic genocide" in our discourse. (Especially after I asked Doug Weller to tag this talk page for discretionary sanctions. Let's keep the India-Pakistan antagonism out.)

But apart from the label: does this actually happen to the extent that Urdu is an endangered language in India? Do Urdu speakers in India massively shift away from their mother tongue to speak a different language? Do they cease to pass it on to their children? Urdu speakers in India face pressures from two sides as depicted in Rizwnan Ahmad's paper. Apart from the deficient infrastructure for learning Urdu at a formal level, and the "fifth-column" stigma associated with being a Muslim and Urdu-speaker, they also experience pressure from their own "camp": whether it's condescension from high-brow Urdu speakers who call their speech "broken Urdu" (which equals denying their Urdu-ness), or the rejection anything of written in Devanagari as Urdu, even if it is replete with High Urdu vocabulary. I am sure there is more literature available to address this sensitive but very important topic, nevertheless R Ahmad's paper is a good start (NB again, for inclusion in the article Urdu). –Austronesier (talk) 12:06, 26 February 2020 (UTC)


 * "Linguistic genocide" is not originally mine. It is Syed Shahabuddin's from the article Status of Urdu in India, Mainstream Weekly, 2008, based on an analysis of the 2001 census.  In other words, that was the situation 20 years ago.  Please read the last three paragraphs.  But I agree that, on Wikipedia, it is needlessly provocative.  I won't use it in the future.  (As for discretionary sanctions, I don't see any India-Pakistan rivalry in this page, at least not lately.  The Pakistanis, who number very few now on Wikipedia,  who do know Urdu, have nonetheless pretty much given up on these pages. The POV in these pages seems to have been introduced by editors who typically edit India-related pages; I haven't checked but, it has the tell-tale markers.  If you think I am in either camp, please  see the statistics of the India page or the Talk:India page, my user page, my barnstars, or, for that matter, the History of Pakistan pag.)
 * As for the questions you raised in your last paragraph, which are all good ones, you will see in Shahabuddin's article, which to be sure is not as scholarly as Ahmad's, in the four generations since India's independence there has been a discernible shift in Urdu knowledge among Muslims: from a generation that was literate in Urdu (to whatever extent they were), to their children who lost knowledge of the script, but not the pronunciation, to their children who have lost the pronunciation, but not the vocabularly—which for even for many very simple words is rather different in Urdu from Hindi, abba/walid (father) Kwaab (dream) nazar (sight) daraKt (tree) navase (grandchildren), ...—to the fourth generation that is gradually losing that vocabulary as well, the collocations, the phrases, even, in some instances, the sentence structure that makes Urdu different from Hindi. I'm only beginning to look at the linguistic and sociolinguistics sources, but I know the two languages at a good level of depth to know that it is not just the literary vocabulary and script that are different. I can hear the difference when children speak the two languages.
 * There are pockets, of course, in India where Urdu is alive and well, even thriving. Here is an example from the Awadh region, a man is speaking after the funeral of an Urdu poet.  Quite a few common words in his speech are different.  Listen here.  Maybe as India progresses materially the, Urdu speakers, who are mostly Muslims (although the powers-that-be in India—and sometimes Muslims themselves, defensively—keep repeating Urdu is not the language of Muslims alone) will make independent and private efforts.  To some extent that is already happening, there are more newspapers in Urdu today than there were 70 years ago; but then again that is a universal phenomenon, a refection of the more easily available publishing technology, especially on the internet.  Anyway I am slowly reading the scholarly literature.  Thanks for your very well expressed reply.    Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  14:09, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:Hindustani which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 01:02, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

Fowler&fowler's notes for an eventual RFC
At some point of time, I will be conducting an RFC, and will advertise not only in WikiProjects Linguistics, but also India, Pakistan, History, and British Empire. Please do not respond in this section, only in the Responses sub-section below. Fowler&amp;fowler «Talk»  11:30, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

The term "Hindustani" for any current language-related concept is considered mostly obsolete in the scholarly literature
"Hindustani" is being used in this article in a variety of closely related meanings:
 * "a register of the language, deliberately free of ultra-Sanskritization on the one hand and ultra-Perso-Arabization on the other." (See long quote from Michael C. Shapiro in the evidence below)
 * "a common colloquial base of HINDI and URDU and to its function as lingua franca over much of India" (See long quote from Colin Masica in the evidence below)
 * a "Khari boli lingua franca" (See long quote from Ruth Laila Schmidt below.)
 * For the "formalized middlebrow style—associated with Gandhian attempts at Hindi-Muslim unity." (See the long quote from Ashok Kelkar in the evidence below)
 * a "simplified Hindi-Urdu" (See long quote from George Cardona in the subsection below)
 * "as a term for the lingua franca of a large swath of South Asia" (See long quote from Afroz Taj in the evidence below.)
 * "as a term for the "lingua franca of northern India' (See long quote from Tom Hoogervorst in the evidence below.)
 * "synonymous with both Hindi and Urdu." (See long quote from Richard K Barz in the evidence below)
 * the same language whose essentially different dialects are Hindi and Urdu. (See long quote from  Barry Blake in the evidence below)

Shapiro, Masica, Schmidt, Kelkar, Cardona, Taj, Hoogervorst, Barz and Blake, are all scholars of linguistics. All except Blake are scholars of languages spoken in South Asia; of these, all except Barz specialize in languages of Northern India and Pakistan.

It is their contention that the term "Hindustani" in any of these closely related meanings is obsolete. See evidence:


 * Scholarly literature:Michael C. Shapiro Professor Emeritus of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington says on page 150 of: "At the level of everyday speech (but not in their formal and literary registers), spoken Hindi and Urdu are for all practical purposes the same, and for this reason it is not uncommon for hear reference to 'Hindi-Urdu,' analogously to the now disappearing term 'Serbo-Croatian.' The term 'Hindustani' is now obsolete except in extremely specific contexts (e.g., 'Hindustani music,' with reference to the classical musical traditions of North [as opposed to South] India). In earlier times the term was used in several distinct, and sometimes contradictory senses. As used by Gandhi, it referred to a register of the language, deliberately free of ultra-Sanskritization on the one hand and ultra-Perso-Arabization on the other. The term could also be used in different contexts to refer to a wide range of spoken or written styles, which would today be thought of as Urdu, Hindi, or even regional vernacular dialects. There is little basis, however, for continuing to use the term 'Hindustani' today, when a wide range of more specific and up to date terms are available." Note: Note: Shapiro is also author of:, which is being used selectively on this page to make the case that the term Hindustani is not obsolete.  But you have heard it very clearly from the horse's mouth now!


 * Scholarly literature: Pioneering linguist Ashok Ramchandra Kelkar, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the Deccan College, University of Poona, in his classic study, says, "'If we say that Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, and the rest are the regionally ‘‘marked' koines of South Asia (to use the convenient cover term for India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Ceylon), Hindi-Urdu (or Hirdu as I propose to call it from now on) is, much like its predecessor Sanskrit and its contemporary rival English, the regionally ‘‘unmarked' koine of South Asia. When its homeland is defined, it is done negatively as the residual area left by the regionally 'marked' koines. This residual area is sometimes called Hindustan or Upper India or, with some inexactitude, North India (pages 2, 3) ... Attempts to set up a middle path—using the name Hindustani and using the formalized middlebrow style—associated with Gandhian attempts at Hindi-Muslim unity can now be definitely relegated. to history.  Outside the Hindi-Urdu (Kelkar uses his contraction 'Hirdu' here) adherent area, Hindi is cultivated by Hindu Rajasthanis in Maharashtra, in Calcutta, and elsewhere; by some Hindus in the Panjabi dialect-area of (East) Panjab; and by some Hindus (especially women) in Kashmir, while Urdu is cultivated by speakers of Panjabi, Kashmiri, and Regional Dakhani and by some Parsis in Bombay. Within the Hindi-Urdu adherent area of India, the cultivation of Urdu has been associated with Muslims, and with Kayastha Hindus and immigrant Kashmiri Hindus and the cultivation of Hindi has been associated with Hindu women (even among Kayasthas and Kashmiris), Hindu baniyas, and pandits (but not, apparently, with sadhus). (p 9)"
 * Sociolinguistics scholarship: Pioneering Indian sociolinguist Lachman M. Khubchandani, Professor of Linguistics, Centre of Communications Studies, Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi,
 * (Google scholar citation index > 1,000)
 * See his work described in
 * See his work described in:
 * says in: says, "The term “Hindustani/Hindostani” was very current in pre-Independence India, representing colloquial Urdu or colloquial Hindi. The 1951 and 1961 Census declarations reveal the rapid pace of decline in the number of speakers claiming Hindustani in most of the Indian states."
 * Scholarly literature: Afroz Taj is Associate Professor of Urdu at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was previously an Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University.  His old website "About Hindi-Urdu," at NC State being prominently cited in the lead sentence to make the case that "Hindustani" is not an obsolete term.  However, his  new website at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill says: "The languages commonly known as Hindi, Urdu, Hindi-Urdu and Hindustani, are virtually the same language in spoken form and have for centuries functioned as the lingua franca of a large swath of South Asia, from Baluchistan to Bengal and from Karnataka to Kashmir. Nowadays, however, many people reflexively consider Urdu and Hindi separate languages largely on the basis of their different writing systems, Urdu being written in a modified Perso-Arabic script called Nastaliq, and Hindi in a script called Devanagari which is used in a number of other South Asian languages including Marathi and Nepali. Meanwhile, the terms “Hindustani,” which was popular in the colonial period, and “Hindi-Urdu,” which has been favored in academic circles since the 1980s, acknowledge and affirm Hindi and Urdu’s shared history, although neither term has much popular currency in South Asia today."


 * Nomenclature Colin Masica, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and South Asian Languages at the University of Chicago says in his magnum opus, (Google Scholar citation index 1133 (i.e. the book has been cited in 1,133 scholarly publications.)) "2.4 Nomenclature Although European languages present a few instances of multiple or fluctuating names (e.g. Ruthenian! Little Russian/Ukrainian), these have now been largely sorted out. Linguistic nomenclature in the Indo-Aryan field, on the other hand, still constitutes a boulder-strewn path over which one must pick one’s way carefully. Nomenclature complicates the Hindi-Urdu situation, as we have seen. (it is in fact even more complicated than just described: besides the once-ubiquitous Hindustani (now seldom used), the more specific Dakani or Dakhini, and the earlier Hindui and Hindavi, there was also Rekhta (< Pers. ‘mixed’ = ‘the Hindustani or Urdu language’ [Platts 1965 (1884)]), and its specialized feminine counterpart Rekhti [imitated] women’s speech’. “Hindi” in the broader sense, referring to all the speech varieties of the Hindi area, is, of course, equivalent to a plethora of more specific names.)"


 * Official nomenclature: Colin Masica also says in says: "Hindustani - term referring to common colloquial base of HINDI and URDU and to its function as lingua franca over much of India, much in vogue during Independence movement as expression of national unity; after Partition in 1947 and subsequent linguistic polarization it fell into disfavor; census of 1951 registered an enormous decline (86-98 per cent) in no. of persons declaring it their mother tongue (the majority of HINDI speakers and many URDU speakers had done so in previous censuses); trend continued in subsequent censuses: only 11,053 returned it in 1971...mostly from S India."


 * Official nomenclature: Ruth Laila Schmidt Professor Emeritus of Urdu, University of Oslo and author of (Google scholar citation index 162), says in her article  :"In the early 1800s, the British chose the Khari Boli lingua franca, which they called Hindustani, as their medium for administration, and sponsored the composition of Hindustani prose texts in both the Persian and Dévanagari scripts. The Hindi variant of Khari Boll, hitherto seldom written (Nespital 1998:214) now began to emerge as a literary language. In the course of the nineteenth century, it was to rival not only Urdu, but claim other languages in north India as its ‘dialects’ (Srivastava 1995:229), and in due course to inherit the literary traditions of its Hindi sister dialects Braj Bhasa and Avadhi. Grierson comments that the Hindustani Prem Sagar, or ‘Ocean of Love’ composed by Lalliji Lal in the Dévanagari script, was: so far as the prose portions went, practically written in Urdu, with Indo-Aryan words substituted wherever a writer in that form of speech would use Persian ones ...The language fulfilled a want. It gave a lingua franca to the Hindus. It enabled men of widely different provinces to converse with each other without having recourse to the (to them) unclean words of the Musalmans (Grierson 1916:46)." Urdu was already Persianized. Khari Boli Hindi was now made acceptable by preferring tadbhava Hindi words over, or substituting tatsama Sanskrit words for, Perso-Arabic ones. Hindustani officially disappeared after 1947; neither Schedule VIII of the Constitution of India, which enumerates the languages of India, nor the official documents of Pakistan make even a cursory mention of it (G. C. Narang, personal communication). Unofficially, the Hindustani lingua franca is a fully functioning vernacular link language in India, Pakistan and among the South Asian diaspora.


 * Scholarly literature: Barry Blake, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, La Trobe University, Melbourne, in (Google scholar  citation index 40) says: "There is one other language with a vast number of speakers and that is Hindi-Urdu, which has over 300 million first-language speakers and about 300 million second-language speakers. Hindi is the national language of India and is written in a form of Indian (Devanagari) script, Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and is written in a form of Arabic script adopted from Persia, but the two are essentially different dialects of the same language, to which the term ‘Hindustani’ was often applied before the partition of India into India and Pakistan."


 * Scholarly literature: Tom Hoogervorst, a historical linguist, in  says: "The term “Hindustani” is used here to refer to the lingua franca of nineteenth-century northern India, bearing in mind that it is not used much at present. Within the Hindustani continuum, the variety written in Devanāgarī script and relying on Sanskrit for lexical enrichment is known as “Hindi,” whereas the mutually intelligible variety drawing from the Perso-Arabic script and lexicon is known as “Urdu.” See Rahman, “From Hindi to Urdu,” for more discussion on the terminological nuances of this macro-language."


 * Already Obsolete in 1976/1983 in humor columns of the New York Times:  (Humorous aside) The use of "Hindustani" had given rise to the common American malapropism, "Do you speak Hindu?"  Richard Salomon, the William P. and Ruth Gerberding University Professor Emeritus of Asian Languages and Literature at the University of Washington, scholar of early Buddhism, and author of  (Google scholar citation index 309), at the beginning of his career in 1976, caught William Safire, then a columnist at the New York Times committing some version of it: "Dear Mr. Safire: Regarding 'pundit': This is a Hindi word (actually, a Sanskrit word used in Hindi). 'Hindu' designates religion; there is no language by this name. This very common confusion may be caused by the obsolete term 'Hindustani' ('Language of the land of the Hindus'), used to refer to the colloquial form of what is now called 'Hindi.' Sincerely yours, Richard Salomon Visiting Assistant Professor of Sanskrit, University of Minnesota Minneapolis, Minnesota."  (Note: In this instance, by "Hindustani," Safire meant Hindi, not colloquial Hindi-Urdu.  See more in the Ambiguous Term sub-section below.)

Richard K Barz in, says: "Since Hindustani is thus synonymous with both Hindi and Urdu,it has become an obsolete term and what used to be known as Hindustani is today called either Hindi or Urdu."
 * Obsolete also in Mauritius, the first stop in the migration associated with the British indenture system of the 19th-century: (Note: The reference here is not to Hindustani in South Asia, but Hindustani in Mauritius:

Khari boli, Urdu, lingua-franca, development of Modern Standard Hindi, Hindi-Urdu, and styles of Hindi-Urdu

 * The Argument: Khari boli speech, supplemented with Persian vocabulary, had spread all over north India by the end of the 18th century. It had been given a literature. ( Not prose, to be sure, for that grew out of the College of Fort William after 1800, when the British employed Urdu literateurs to write text-books (in prose obviously) for their civil servants, and to go on to creating a simplified Urdu standard, which they called Hindustani, in which the civil servants had to take exams. Urdu prose literature grew out of that.  And eventually Hindi copied.  ) The poetry, of Sauda, Mir, and Insha, ..., had thrived in the 18th century in Urdu, not in Persian; the latter had stopped being a language of mushairas, qasidas, ghazals, ... after 1700 or thereabouts.  There were prose-poems, the Shahr Ashobs, for example, of Nazeer Akbarabadi, on Diwali, Raksha Bandhan (see example there), even the Agra famine of 1837–38.  (See a bigger list here). The British chose the Khari boli Urdu because it had become the lingua franca during Mughal rule, especially in the 18th century.  (  Aside/speculation: Had the lingua franca been a Persianized Tamil, or -Bengali, the College of Fort William would have produced the textbooks in those languages.  Without the Muslims, without the accidents of geography that brought the Muslims to that region,  these dialects would have remained obscure ones; their role is incidental. The Muslims however are not incidental.  They would have created a lingua franca wherever their rule had established itself in India.  )   This runs counter to the POV in all Hindi-Urdu articles that there was a simple colloquial language Hindustani/Hindi-Urdu, which split on the one hand into Persianized Urdu and on the other into Sanskritized Hindi.  So, summing up:  There wasn't a split.  There was a highly Persianized language Urdu, with a rich poetic literature, which was given a prose literature during the early 19th-century, when, concurrently, a simplified version of it was promoted by the British as an official language first of Company rule in India and then of the British Raj.  Hindi literature, in Khari boli, then arose, in both prose and poetry, and by the end of the 19th century or early 20th-century, had ramped up sufficiently to be on par with Urdu.  Note also: For that reason, the usage is:  Urdu and Modern Standard Hindi, not Modern Standard Urdu and Modern Standard Hindi. (Copied and edited from my post in Talk:Urdu)


 * The Evidence:


 * Ralph Russell was Professor of Urdu at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London, and one of the foremost scholars of Urdu in the latter half of the 20th century.  had mentioned a textbook of his on Urdu.  Here he is: "People who would like to think that Prem Chand wrote Hindustani therefore assume that he did; and he didn’t. In the same way “fair-minded” opponents of excessively Sanskritized Hindi assume that there is a parallel excessively Persianized/Arabicized form of Urdu; and there isn’t. Urdu as written both in India and Pakistan is no more Persianized/Arabicized today than it ever was. Its Persianization, if one wants to use that term, was already accomplished when modern Hindi came into existence, and there is virtually no further scope for it."


 * R. S. McGregor, late Reader in Hindi at the University of Cambridge, on the birth of Modern Hindi and Urdu in the introduction of his Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary (Google Scholar Citation Index: 347). He agrees with Ralph Russell that Urdu already existed, Modern Hindi was created in the 19th century.  (My note: it is inaccurate to label them "Modern Standard Urdu" and "Modern Standard Hindi."  The correct terms are: Urdu and Modern Standard Hindi.)  Here is McGregor: "The term ‘modern Hindi’ denotes a language written in the Devanagari script and relatively standardised in its written form (but less so in pronunciation and spoken usage) which is in general use today in most of north and central India. Modern Hindi co-exists in this region with regional forms of speech more or less closely cognate to it and with many local dialects, as well as with Urdu, a complementary style of language: one potentially identical with modern Hindi at the spoken level while expressing a distinctively Persian cultural orientation at more literary levels. Urdu, an earlier specialisation than Hindi of a mixed speech of the Delhi area which had gained currency as a lingua franca, had arisen broadly because of an increasing artificiality in the use of Persian for literary and other formal purposes in Indo-Muslim circles during the later Mughal period. Modern Hindi by contrast arose in the nineteenth century to meet a different need: that for a linguistic vehicle which should allow communication with, and among, a wider section of the north Indian population than had been possible in practice in the case of Urdu. The use of an Indian script, and of a smaller component of Persian and Arabic vocabulary than was often used in the Urdu of the time, were essential prerequisites to this end. There was a correspondingly increased use of words of Indian origin in the new style, and in particular of Sanskritic words."


 * Note "potentially identical." My question: how is this different from AmE and BE being potentially identical? But we don't write those as standardized registers of late medieval English, or Elizabethan English, or Restoration English, or ...


 * McGregor on the development of Modern Hindi and number of users of Hindi-Urdu: "The modern Hindi style gained currency in the period up to the 1860s above all because it was a medium of education and instruction. The rise of a modern sense of Indian identity in north India from the 1860s onwards became the mainspring of an accelerating increase in the use of Hindi in the later nineteenth century. The new style won increasing official recognition first in parts of north and central India where Urdu was less firmly established and finally, by 1900, in the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh). It had by this time become a well established vehicle for journalism and belles lettres. The factors responsible for its rise continued to operate during the following decades, and this meant that its further development in terms both of numbers of users and range of functions was assured. By contrast the development of Urdu suffered some retardation in the twentieth century. The potential of Hindi as a favoured form of Hindi-Urdu, and the great geographical range of Hindi-Urdu across the sub-continent and indeed beyond (which makes this language probably the world’s third in terms of number of users) brought it about that ‘Hindi in the Devanagari script’ was recognised in 1947 as the official language of India. The main factors influencing the further development of Hindi were to be, first as before, the rate of spread of education and literacy, and secondly the relationships of competition and contact existing between Hindi and English and between Hindi and the Indian regional languages."


 * R. S. McGregor, says in  (Google scholar citation index 320):"WRITTEN Hindi is based on a style of Hindi speech, long established in educated use in the urban centres of north India, to which the name Khaṛī Bolī, ‘established speech’, was given. This written Hindi is relatively standardized over the whole of the Hindi language area (the area within which Hindi is the predominant language of administration and public life). We may thus speak of a written ‘modern standard Hindi’. Furthermore, educated persons throughout the Hindi language area are able to conform to a large degree in their speech to the norm of Khaṛī Bolī grammatical usage and pronunciation, which can to this extent be called a spoken ‘modern standard Hindi’ usage and pronunciation. However, considerable variations can occur, especially if the speakers’ native dialects are related only rather distantly to Khaṛī Bolī. This is particularly true of pronunciation, and as a result there cannot really be said to be any one ‘standard’ pronunciation of the standard language. Uneducated persons outside the Khaṛī Bolī area normally have little knowledge of Khaṛī Bolī. The forms used in this book are all of the Khaṛī Bolī dialect as used by educated persons very largely throughout the Hindi language area, but especially by those brought up in the western part of it."


 * About Urdu, McGregor has this to say in his book: "During the Muslim period many Arabic and Persian loanwords found their way into Hindi dialects, especially into Khaṛī Bolī. Those that denote common objects or ideas are usually fully acclimatized in modern standard Hindi. More formal, literary Arabic and Persian loanwords (corresponding in style roughly to the Higher range of Latinate vocabulary in English) are usually restricted to that form of Persianized Khaṛī Bolī known as Urdu, which is used chiefly in Muslim society or by persons familiar to some extent with that society. Almost no words of the latter kind are used in this book."


 * Robert King, the Audre and Bernard Rapoport Regents Chair Emeritus of Jewish Studies and Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus in the Department of Linguistics, University of Texas, Austin, in, describes the hierarchies of sociolinguist Ashok Ramchandra Kelkar (see the section above for his views on the usage "Hindustani" for a current language): "While the script difference between Hindi and Urdu is extreme, no less extreme are differences in the 'higher' regions of vocabulary, grammar, and style. Kelkar (1968: 6-7) has summarized the sociolinguistic situation, and I quote him here at length: [A]s a linguistic system Hindi-Urdu has no marked dialect variations; but it has the full gamut of styles: formalized highbrow (poetry, learned discourse, oratory, religious sermons and the like in the 'great tradition' of urban centers of power, commerce, and religion); formalized middlebrow (popular printed literature, songs, and mass propaganda); casual middlebrow (everyday educated talk especially in linguistically mixed groups and within the regionally uprooted upper or middle class family; private letter writing and newspapers waver between this and the previous styles; out of the four styles this is the most receptive to borrowings from English); and casual lowbrow (this is definitely substandard and outside the 'Great Tradition'; everyday talk in lower-class, uneducated, urban milieus; this style, often called 'Bazaar Hindustani' [bazaru hindustani], is sometimes resorted to even by educated speakers and even in printed literature destined for the uneducated lower classes) [The] polarization between 'Hindi' and 'Urdu' reaches its maximum in the formalized highbrow style."


 * George Cardona, Sanskritist, and Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, in his signed article, Indo-Aryan Languages in Encyclopaedia Britannic says: Modern Indo-Aryan stage Before independence, under British rule (entrenched from the 18th century), there were princely states within dialect areas; under Mughal rule (16th–18th centuries), Persian was the language which was used by the court and by courts of justice and this practice continued in the latter function for a time under the British. Though Hindi–Urdu may have been a lingua franca, the great dialectal diversity of earlier times continued. ... Moreover, the attempt to establish a single national language other than English continues. This search has its origin in national and Hindu movements of the 19th century down to the time of Mahatma Gandhi, who promoted the use of a simplified Hindi–Urdu, called Hindustani. ... When the time came, however, Hindi could not be declared the sole national language; English remains a co-official language. Though Hindi can claim to be the lingua franca of a large population in North India, other languages such as Bengali have long and great literary traditions


 * Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is being prominently cited as an exemplar of "Hindustani" use and usage. There only two references to "lingua franca" in the  Mahatma's autobiography, ; one is to French being a lingua franca of the Continent; the other says: "was faced with a critical, if not hostile, audience, to whom I had to explain and bring home my viewpoint. But I had cast aside all shyness. I was not there to deliver an address in the faultless, polished Urdu of the Delhi Muslims, but to place before the gathering my views in such broken Hindi as I could command. And in this I was successful. This meeting afforded me a direct proof of the fact that Hindi-Urdu alone could become the lingua franca of India. Had I spoken in English, I could not have produced the impression that I did on the audience, and the Maulana might not have felt called upon to deliver his challenge. Nor, if he had delivered it, could I have taken it up effectively."
 * Note On three pages in the autobiography, Gandhi uses "Hindi-Hindustani" or "Hindustani." (It is not clear to me what he means by Hindustani, whether Urdu, or simplified Urdu.  Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  15:04, 23 February 2020 (UTC))
 * From the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters: :"As a vast area of Northern India has got Hindi-Urdu as its lingua franca employed in various domains of social usages, it was but natural that bilingual dictionaries with Hindi and English come into existence.'"


 * A Text-book on Sociolinguistics: Ronald Wardhaugh, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Toronto and Janet Fuller Professor of European Language and Society at the University of Groningen in "In marked contrast to such language decline, some languages thrive, for example, the Mandarin variety of Chinese, English, Hindi-Urdu, and Spanish (particularly with its spectacular growth in the Americas). One of these, English, has also spread everywhere in the world as a lingua franca (see Crystal 2003, 2004). The United Nations has projected an interesting future for various world languages (see Graddol 2004). Whereas in 1950 about 9 percent of the world’s population spoke English natively, with Spanish and then Hindi-Urdu next with about 5 percent each and with Arabic having 2 percent, by 2000 the proportions were just over 6 percent for English, and over 5 percent for Spanish and Hindi-Urdu, with Hindi-Urdu overtaking Spanish. By 2050 the projection is that Hindi-Urdu will overtake English as its proportion reaches 6 percent and that English, Spanish, and Arabic will all hover around 5 percent."

Issues with the lead
The analysis based on: this version of 23 February 2020 of the page.
 * Sentence 1: The first sentence, "Hindustani ... historically known as Hindi, Hindavi, Urdu, Dehlavi, and Rekhta, is the lingua franca of Northern India and Pakistan.
 * This sentence is being cited to a book on human geography by mother-son geographers, Lydia Mihelič Pulsipher; Alex Pulsipher (2005), World Regional Geography: Global Patterns, Local Lives, Macmillan, ISBN 978-0-7167-1904-5 with a quote: "By the time of British colonialism, Hindustani was the lingua franca of all of northern India and what is today Pakistan."
 * The citation in the article does not give the page number, but it is 324. It must have required sleight-of-hand in the bottom of the barrel as the full quotes in the book,, about Hindustani, which are on pages 314 and 324, are rather different: "One legacy of the Mughals is the more than 420 million Muslims now living in South Asia. The Mughals left a unique heritage of architecture, art, literature, and linguistics that includes the Taj Mahal, the fortress at Agra, miniature painting, and the tradition of lyric poetry. The Mughals also helped to produce the Hindustani language, which became the lingua franca (the language of trade) of the northern Indian subcontinent. Hindustani is still used by more than 400 million people (page 314) ... By the time of British colonization, Hindustani—an amalgam of Persian and Sanskrit-based northern Indian languages—was the lingua franca of all of northern India and what is today Pakistan. The Muslims wrote Hindustani in a form of Arabic script and called it Urdu, whereas the Hindus and other groups wrote it in a script derived from Sanskrit and called it Hindi. ... Hindi, because of its origins in Hindustani and the popularity of Hindi-language films, is understood by most Pakistanis and by about 50 percent of India’s population. (p 324)"


 * Sentence 2: "It is an Indo-Aryan language, deriving its base primarily from the Western Hindi dialect of Delhi, also known as Khariboli."
 * This sentence is cited to: with quote = Hindustani is a Central Indo-Aryan language based on Khari Boli (Khaṛi Boli). Its origin, development, and function reflect the dynamics of the sociolinguistic contact situation from which it emerged as a colloquial speech. It is inextricably linked with the emergence and standardization of Urdu and Hindi.
 * The full quote is: "Hindustani is a Central Indo-Aryan language based on Khari Boli (Khari Boli). Its origin, development, and function reflect the dynamics of the sociolinguistic contact situation from which it emerged as a colloquial speech. It is inextricably linked with the emergence and standardization of Urdu and Hindi. The linguistic relationship among Hindustani, Urdu, and Hindi highlights the theoretical and empirical problems of linguistic analysis and description. It also reveals the politics of language conflict and identity in the complex sociopolitical and multilingual situation of India. Hindustani as a colloquial speech developed over almost seven centuries from 1100 to 1800. The Muslims conquered northern India from the 10th to the 13th centuries and settled down in the country, bringing with them their Persian language and culture. This mixing of cultures provided the contact situation for the emergence of Hindustani as a lingua franca."


 * Sentence 3: Hindustani is a pluricentric language, with two standardised registers, Modern Standard Hindi and Modern Standard Urdu.
 * This is cited to a book on Hindutva by an English professor: with quote: "Urdu, like Hindi, was a standardized register of the Hindustani language deriving from the Dehlavi dialect and emerged in the eighteenth century under the rule of the late Mughals."
 * a book on Hindi Christian literature by Rakesh Peter-Das a theologian and Assistant Professor of Religion at Hope College: with quote, "Two forms of the same language, Nagari Hindi and Persianized Hindi (Urdu) had identical grammar, shared common words and roots, and employed different scripts."
 * another book on geography: with quote, "Hindustani is the basis for both languages ..."
 * The reader has no opportunity to consider the major source: (Google Scholar citation index 611), whose article authored by Hans Raj Dua, Professor Emeritus of Sociolinguistics at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore:  begins with: "The emergence and development of Hindi-Urdu as pluricentric national varieties spans over almost nine hundred years. The protagonists of both Hindi and Urdu have expressed a wide range of views and theories, sometimes confusing and contradictory, about their origin and development. However, there seems to be agreement on the basic premises regarding the origin, directions of development and the emergence of Hindi-Urdu as pluricentric varieties. For a clear understanding of the course of development, the entire period of almost nine hundred years can be considered in terms of the following stages: (i) Formative period (ii) Emergence of different bases (iii) Consolidation period (iv) Polarization and identity formation The formative period may be considered to begin roughly from 1100 AD with the invasion of Muslims and their settlement in India. It marks the beginning of a variety for communication between the rulers and the local population. The early form of Hindi-Urdu had a wide dialect base which, though derived basically from the Western Apabhrarhsa, included Braj-Bhasha, Harayani or Bangru, “vernacular Hindustani” and even sometimes Panjabi and Rajasthani, besides the Perso-Arabic element as a result of interaction between the Muslim and Hindu cultures. It is therefore not surprising that the origin of Urdu has been traced to Braj-Bhasha, Harayani or even Panjabi (See Zaidi 1989 for a summary of various views on the origin of Urdu). However, it must be pointed out that it was the “vernacular Hindustani” or Khari Boli which was present as one of the elements in the early formative periods and which gradually became stronger with the growth of Hindi-Urdu so that by 1800 it could be clearly stated that its basic source was Khari Boli."


 * Sentence 4: "The language's first written poetry, in the form of Old Hindi, can be traced to as early as 769 AD."
 * This has been cited to a phrasebook published by Lonely Planet Travel Books.
 * But the fuller quote on pages 11 and 12 is: Hindi and Urdu are generally considered to be one spoken language with two different literary traditions. This means that Hindi and Urdu speakers who shop in the same markets (and watch the same Bollywood films) have no problems understanding each other.  ... Considered as one, these tongues constitute the second most spoken language in the world, sometimes called Hindustani. ... Both Hindi and Urdu developed from Classical Sanskrit, which appeared in the Indus Valley (modern Pakistan and northwest India) at about the start of the Common Era.  The first old Hindi (or Apabhransha) poetry was written in 769 AD, and by the European Middle Ages, it became known as 'Hindvi'.  Muslim Turks invaded the Punjab in 1027 and took control of Delhi in 1193. They paved the way for the Islamic Mughal Empire, which ruled northern India from the 16th century until it was defeated by the British Raj in the mid-19th century.  It was at this time that the language of this book began to take form, a mixture of Hindvi grammar with Arabic, Persian and Turkish vocabulary.  The Muslim speakers of Hindvi began to write in Arabic script, creating Urdu, while the Hindu population incorporated the new words but continued to write in Devanagari script."

Please do not edit the section above as it will keep changing. Please respond here if you need to. This is not the RFC though. Fowler&amp;fowler «Talk»  11:30, 20 February 2020 (UTC)  Updated  Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  05:39, 23 February 2020 (UTC)
 * User:Fowler&fowler, if you would like to start an RfC, the wording of it must be accepted by the all of the other parties commenting here, e.g. User:Kwamikagami, User:RaviC, User:Austronesier, etc. Thus far you have failed to gain consensus for your fringe views regarding Hindustani/Hindi-Urdu and the selective cherry-picking of sources won't help. Cheers, AnupamTalk 23:24, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

I haven't read most of the above (TLDR), but I do agree with Fowler on one thing I noticed, re. the first Hindustani poetry. AFAIK, Apabhransha is not Hindustani. AFAIK, the first known Hindustani poetry was in Deccani dialect, and introduced to the court in Delhi by Wali Mohammed Wali after the fall of the Bahmanid Sultanate. Before that, Hindustani was not written, as Persian was the court and literary language. Before that, "Urdu" (if we define that word to mean the literary language) did not exist, and therefore "Hindi" in the narrow modern sense did not exist (or rather, literary Hindi was Braj and Awadhi, not Hindustani). Sure, Apabhransha may have been ancestral to Hindustani, but by that logic we could say that the earliest Urdu literature is the Rig Veda, which most readers would probably think ingenuous. — kwami (talk) 23:42, 25 February 2020 (UTC)

Additional sources about contemporary Hindustani / Hindi–Urdu (added by Austronesier)
Here are some more quotes from additional sources, not in order to prove any point, but just to supplement the above listing by.

1.

p.429:

p.430:

(NB: Smith uses "Hindustani" here in a quite unorthodox manner: not as a label for one or all variants of Khariboli/Dehlavi derived lects, but as a cover term to include all Western Hindi and Eastern Hindi dialects, thus equivalent to "Hindi" in a wider sense in the Griersson tradition. By all standards, this may be a contemporary use of "Hindustani", but one I'd suggest not to follow.)

2.

p.399:

FWIW, Kachru list 16 references, only one of them has "Hindustani" in its title (Russell's "New Course in Hindustani" (1980), a title with a twist, as discussed before).

To be continued. –Austronesier (talk) 09:33, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the sources.  Thank you also for your long-ranging and deep comments on Talk:Urdu, which I had forgotten to read.  I just have and will need to mull them over before responding.   Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  13:22, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Minor correction, that was on Talk:Hindustani. I have not yet entered the field in Talk:Urdu, although of course I have my thoughts on it. I strongly object to the conjecture that "High" Urdu and "High" Hindi were carved out in a parallel fashion out of some kind of neutral and innocent "Hindustani". Urdu is the product of the Mughal age, the organic result of blending Perso-Arabic elements into an Indo-Aryan vernacular at every stylsitic level. Before Modern Hindi was created as a kind of Urdu-derived "POV-fork" (to borrow WP lingo), Urdu (in its heartland) was the language of Muslims and Hindus alike, be it for high-brow or low-brow use, with all due stylistic variation. That's what pretty much all sources say (Russell's "Notes on Hindi and Urdu" are particularly clear about that). –Austronesier (talk) 16:23, 4 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Sorry. I need to watchlist all related pages. :) True, what you say is similar to what I have been reading in McGregor's introduction in the Oxford Hindi-English Dictionary. McG being a lexicographer, who made a 20-year effort to write that dictionary, is very knowledgeable, and precise.  Will copy some relevant section from it either here or above after I have understood it.   Fowler&amp;fowler  «Talk»  21:45, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Lashkari Zaban title
It is written near the picture, that it is an in the Nastaʿlīq script written sample. It's Arabic script (typographic Naskh), but not Nastaʿlīq at all. 83.149.240.100 (talk) 08:57, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

I came here to say the exact same thing. I'll change that. I'm not sure "Naskh" is correct either, so for now it can be "Perso-Arabic in a modern font". If someone has a better name please update it, but it's not Nastaʿlīq, that's the one that makes the words go diagonal. Irtapil (talk) 12:59, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I would scrap the image altogether: I'm not sure it's needed, and it's got a watermark. – Uanfala (talk) 13:06, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Agree scrap it, I was just about to start a topic to ask opinions, but it seems we covered it already and there's no objections. So l'll delete it. Would the word Nastsliq in a free font like Noto Nastsliq or SIL's nastaliq be a good replacement? Is there any other word or phrase that might fit? The word Urdu features no joins so that isn't a good example, and Hindustani is not great either (since no native speaker calls it that). The nastaliq page users an example in Persian so that doesn't fit. Hand written would be better, but I lack that skill. And I'm not sure where to find a good copyright free hand written example in Urdu? Irtapil (talk) 13:41, 6 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, I got sidetracked but when I came back to delete image it seems someone best me to it? Irtapil (talk) 16:39, 6 March 2020 (UTC)