The origin and history of Hindustani
The origin of Hindustani can be traced back to Dehlavi (sometimes called Old Hindi), which was the language spoken natively in Delhi from 13th to 15th centuries. It had a Prakrit vocabulary, having evolved from Shauraseni Prakrit.
Dehlavi was written in the Nagari script. It was used as a court language in the Delhi Sultanate alongside Persian. It was written in the Perso-Arabic script during this period.
Due to Islamic influence, Dehlavi collected an increasing amount of Persian, Arabic and Turkish loanwords. It evolved into the modern Hindustani language spoken natively in North India.
Hindustani was used as a vernacular in the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire. Deccani Urdu, a southern dialect of Hindustani, was used by the Bahmani Sultanate and the succeeding Deccan sultanates, alongside Persian and regional languages like Marathi, Telugu and Kannada.
Deccani was also used by the former Hyderabad State which was annexed by India in 1948. In the north, after the decline of the Mughal Empire, Urdu was used by the Oudh State although the regional language was Awadhi.
Thus, Hindustani was promoted as a vernacular in medieval and early modern India by Islamic empires for hundreds of years. In this period, Hindustani was primarily written in the Nastaliq variant of the Perso-Arabic script.
Urdu, the standard Persianised register of Hindustani, developed as a literary language in the Mughal period. In the 19th century, Kauravi or the Delhi dialect became the basis of Hindi, the Sanskritised register of Hindustani, which was popular among Indian nationalists.
Hindustani has grown as a lingua franca in northern India and Pakistan. While many regions in northern India have local languages, people use Hindi to communicate with speakers of other languages.
In Pakistan, Punjabi is the most spoken language, but Urdu is used as the official language and the lingua franca. Hindustani has also risen in popularity due to Bollywood movies.
According to Ethnologue, Hindi has 345 million native speakers and 609 million total speakers, while Urdu has 71 million native speakers and 232 million total speakers. This means that Hindustani has approximately 416 million native speakers and 425 million non-native speakers altogether.
Originally posted on Quora.
