Urdu
language is mutually intelligible with Standard Hindi language spoken in India.
Both languages share the same Indo-Aryan base and are so similar in basic
structure, grammar and to a large extent, vocabulary and phonology, that they
appear to be one language. From the 13th century until the end of the 18th
century the commonly known language from Delhi to the Awadh region was Hindvi
language. The language was also known by various other names such as Hindavi
and Dehlavi. Standard Hindvi language was first developed by the Turkish
speakers of Khari Boli who migrated from Delhi to the Awadh region, most
notably Amir Khusrau. They mixed the roughness of the Khari Boli with the
relative softness of Awadhi to form a new language which they called "Hindvi."
Hindvi
language later developed into Hindustani language, which further diverged as
Hindi and Urdu. The first Hindustani book "Woh Majlis" was written in
1728. The name Urdu was first used by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around
1780. The Urdu language received recognition and patronage under the British
Raj when the British replaced the Persian and local official languages of North
Indian Jammu and Kashmir state with the Urdu and English language in 1846 and
in Punjab in 1877.
Persian was
no longer the language of administration in British India with the advent of
the British Raj but the Hindustani language still wrote in the Persian script
continued to be used by both Hindus and Muslims in northwestern India. The Hindustani language was promoted in British India by British policies to
counter the previous emphasis on Persian. This triggered a Hindu backlash in
northwestern India, which argued that the language should be written in the
native Devanagari script. Thus a new literary register, called
"Hindi", replaced traditional Hindustani language as the official
language of Bihar in 1881, establishing a sectarian divide of "Urdu"
for Muslims and "Hindi" for Hindus.
The British administrators of India and the Christian missionaries played an
important role in the creation and promotion of the Khariboli-based Hindustani
language into Modern Standard Hindustani language. In 1800, the British East
India Company established a college of higher education in Calcutta named the
Fort William College. John Borthwick Gilchrist, a president of that college,
encouraged the professors of college to write in their native tongue; some of
the works thus produced were in the literary form of the modern Hindustani
language. With the government patronage and the literary popularity, the
Khariboli-based Hindustani language flourished, even as the use of previously
more literary tongues such as Awadhi, Braj, and Maithili declined in the
literary vehicles. The literary works in the Hindustani language gained
momentum from the second half of the 19th century onwards. Gradually, in the
subsequent years, Khariboli-based Hindustani language became the basis for the
standard Hindustani language, which began to be taught in the schools and used
in the government functions.
Khariboli
is also known as Dehlavi, Kauravi, and Hindustani. Khariboli is admitted as a
prestige dialect of Hindi and Urdu also standard register and literary style of
Hindi and Urdu. It is a Western Hindi dialect spoken mainly in the rural
surroundings of Delhi, the areas of Western Uttar Pradesh and the southern
areas of Uttarakhand in India. Khariboli of Delhi developed under the influence
of Persian, Arabic, and Turkic languages over the course of almost 900 years.
It originated in the region of Uttar Pradesh in the Indian subcontinent during
the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1527) and continued to develop under the Mughal
Empire (1526–1858). The earliest examples of Khariboli can be seen in the
compositions of Amir Khusro (1253-1355). Before the rise of Khari Boli, the
literary dialects adopted by the Bhakti saints were; Braj Bhasha by the Krishna
devotees, Awadhi by the Rama devotees and Maithili by the Vaishnavites of
Bihar. The area around Delhi has long been the center of power in northern
India. Therefore, naturally, the Khariboli dialect came to be regarded as
urbane and of a higher standard than the other dialects of northern India.
Khariboli-based Hindustani language gradually gained ground over the 19th
century. Otherwise, before that period, other dialects such as Awadhi, Braj
Bhasha and Maithili were the dialects preferred by littérateurs. Urdu, the
heavily Persianalized version of Khariboli, had replaced Persian as the
literary language of North India by the early 20th century. However, the
association of Urdu with the Muslims prompted the Hindus to develop their own
Sanskritized version of the dialect, leading to the formation of the Modern
Standard Hindi. Urdu is 21st most spoken languages of the world. There are
around 67 million native speakers of Urdu in the world. There were 52 million
in India and 14.7 million in Pakistan as per the 2017 census. Several hundred
thousand Urdu speakers are in the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, UAE, United
States, Canada, and Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, they are called Bihari.
Urdu is one
of the officially recognized languages in India and has an official language
status in the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Telangana, Jammu and
Kashmir and the Indian capital, New Delhi. In Pakistan, as per 2017 census,
Urdu speaking population in Sindh is 8,709,610, in Punjab 5,356,464, in KPK
274,581, in Islamabad 244,966, in Balochistan 99,913, in FATA 24,465, and it
makes 14,709,999 or 7.08% total Urdu speaking population out of 207,685,000
population of Pakistan. The first most spoken language of Pakistan is Punjabi,
second is Pushto, third is Sindhi, fourth is Saraiki and Urdu is the fifth most
spoken language of Pakistan as per the 2017 census. 93% of Pakistan's
population has a native language other than Urdu. Despite this fact, Urdu was
implemented as a national language of Pakistan by the first Urdu Speaking
Hindustani Muhajir Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan and still, it
is implemented in Pakistan.
