Babel, page 25
The grammar is, again, different in many ways from English and its ilk. But though unrelated to the other European languages (except Maltese), Arabic still shares with many of them at least two features that are far from universal. Firstly, it has a definite article – AL. And secondly, it has a gender system which is ultimately based on the biological sexes. In other words, all nouns fall into a category labelled either masculine or feminine, rather than, say, human, animal, vegetal and mineral. Such a sex-based gender-system is frequent in both the Indo-European family and the Afro-Asiatic family, including the Semitic languages. Elsewhere, however, gender systems have some other base or are absent altogether.
Also, let’s not forget that our own Germanic group shares the most salient grammatical characteristic of the Semitic languages. Arabic forms many words on the basis of roots by inserting different vowels (as well as tacking on consonants), and so does English: we could postulate an English root K-N-W which then produces words such as know, knew, known, knowledge and unbeknownst; or a root S-NG to produce sing, sang, sung, unsung, song, singer, et cetera. Granted, this is rather stretching the point, because the English (and Germanic) system is much less systematic and extensive. On the other hand, since this type of word formation is uncommon worldwide, the resemblance is striking. Indeed, a few linguists have daringly argued that there must have been a strong prehistoric influence of Semitic peoples (the seafaring Phoenicians would be good candidates) on the Germanic languages.
Anyway, in spite of all the mutual borrowing and slight similarities, there’s no getting around the fact that Arabic (Semitic, Afro-Asiatic) is very different from English (Germanic, Indo-European). So much so that when linguists attempt to group the major language families into even larger superfamilies – an endeavour fraught with difficulties and therefore avoided by most – they do not usually place Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic close together.
When, in the seventh and eighth centuries, Islam came to live next door to European Christendom, the new neighbours’ cultures were in some ways not quite as different as both of them liked to think. Since their religions originated in the Middle East, they shared many ancient stories, most of their prophets and the unusual belief in a single supreme deity. And the languages? Even there, similarities can be found and contact, as our Concise Dictionary has shown, has led to mutual influence. Arabic is far from an alien.
* The spelling QUR’AN is a fairly good transliteration of the Arabic, though better still would be QURʾĀN, with a hamza instead of an apostrophe and, importantly, a macron on the a. However, it’s not, in my opinion, the English name of Islam’s holy book. KORAN is the English exonym for the book, while QUR’AN or QURʾĀN is the Arabic endonym; in the same way, AUSTRIA is an exonym for the German-speaking endonym ÖSTERREICH, and LANDAN () is the Arabic exonym for LONDON. There is a tendency in English to adopt endonyms in the mistaken belief that exonyms are disrespectful. In fact, they’re usually just adaptations of foreign names to a language’s phonology and spelling. Rather than making the Qur’an more venerable, this faux-thentic spelling makes it look alien. As for pronunciation, speakers of English and other European languages rarely get near the original, regardless of how it is spelt.
4
Hindi-Urdu
hindi
Urdu
550 million speakers
It’s estimated that 325 million are native Hindi-Urdu speakers and 225 second-language speakers, though much higher numbers result if related languages are counted as dialects. Hindi is spoken in large parts of North and Central India; Urdu is spoken in Pakistan, mostly as a second language, and by Muslims in North and Central India. Millions of Indians and Pakistanis live in the UK, the US and the Arabian Peninsula, but Hindi-Urdu is not always their main language.
Hindi-Urdu
SELF-DESIGNATION Either (Hindi) or (Urdu).
ALSO CALLED Hindustani; historically also Hindavi or Delhavi.
FAMILY Hindi-Urdu belongs to the Indo-Aryan (Indic) branch of the Indo-European family.
SCRIPT The choice of writing system has become one of the defining differences between Hindi and Urdu, the former typically using Devanagari, the latter a Perso-Arabic alphabet.
GRAMMAR Nouns have two genders, two numbers (singular and plural) and commonly two cases (rarely, three). Adjectives agree with nouns in gender and number, but in a very limited manner. Pronouns do not specify gender, but do distinguish two degrees of distance (like this and that) and two and sometimes three levels of politeness. The verbal system, like that of English, has a substantial number of tenses and aspects but few different forms.
SOUNDS Hindi-Urdu has three short and seven long vowel sounds and no fewer than thirty-five consonants, including a group of eight that were borrowed from the Dravidian language group (which includes Tamil). In loanwords from Arabic or Persian, some additional consonants may occur. Stress is usually on the penultimate syllable.
LOANWORDS Persian and Arabic (especially Urdu); Sanskrit (Hindi); English (both).
EXPORTS avatar, bandana, bangle, cheetah, chintz, chutney, coolie, cot, cushy, dinghy, dungaree, guru, juggernaut, jungle, loot, pajamas, pundit, purdah, Raj, shampoo, shawl, tank, thug, tom-tom, veranda, yoga and yogi.
ROMANS ONLINE The Roman alphabet is used surprisingly often for both Hindi and Urdu: in film titles, in some advertisements, in Bible translations, and online. Internet use in particular may allow more Indians and Pakistanis to realise that their languages are much less different than official discourse would have it.
4: Hindi-Urdu
Always something breaking us in two
Aren’t I cheating when I treat Hindi and Urdu as one, rather than two, of the world’s twenty largest languages? They’re undoubtedly twins, no argument there, but twins are individuals and should be counted separately. And it’s a fact that their names can’t be used interchangeably. No longer, anyway. Don’t tell a Pakistani they speak Hindi – no sir, it’s Urdu! Don’t tell an Indian they speak Urdu – the horror of it! Unless, that is, you happen to be among Urdu-speaking Indian Muslims (of whom there are tens of millions, a sizeable minority even by Indian standards), in which case they’ll be pleased. But horrified or happy, most Indians and Pakistanis will maintain that Hindi and Urdu are different in important ways.
But the claim is debatable, and much debated. Not among the general populace, who will take any fiery orator’s word for it, and not among the orators, who will take any third-rate linguist’s word for it. But debate there is, and for good reasons.
One reason to question the separateness of Hindi and Urdu is that alongside their different names there’s another that they share: Hindustani. You don’t hear it much anymore on the subcontinent, but it used to be common until the mid-twentieth century and it’s still the prevalent term among heritage speakers elsewhere, for instance in Fiji and Suriname. Largely outdated though it may be, it would be greatly useful, as it describes a living reality in a way that’s less confusing than this double-barrelled ‘Hindi-Urdu’. Bollywood films are as popular in Pakistan as in India, because the dialogues are in a language easily understood by many people in both countries. Conversely, self-proclaimed Hindi speakers can fully and effortlessly appreciate songs said to be in Urdu. In spite of their own strong views on the matter, it’s generally impossible to tell whether the chatter of ordinary people in India is in Hindi or Urdu.
On balance, therefore, I think it’s reasonable to discuss them as one. In my book, people who can freely communicate with each other speak the same language. The divide running through Hindustani is recent, artificial and regretted by more than a few. It’s a rift rather than a break and, left alone, it would gradually heal. Left alone, however, is what it has little hope of being. Not while the rhetoric of nationalism and identity politics so easily wins elections on both sides of the border.
Numerous books have been written about the Indo-Pakistani Partition of 1947, and quite a few about the linguistic intricacies of Hindustani, Hindi and Urdu. Most of them could fairly be titled: Why the Other Side Is To Blame, this Other Side being either the Muslim, the Mughal, the Pakistani or the Hindu, the Brahmin, the Indian. There’s an additional scapegoat common to both sides, namely the British, but while the Brits provide a welcome relief from the reciprocal finger-pointing, they make for poor antagonists, since they no longer argue back.
Fortunately, some writers and thinkers do not treat the issues in such a facile way, and this chapter draws heavily on two of them. The eminent Pakistani academic Tariq Rahman in his book From Hindi To Urdu critically examines Urdu from its first mention around 1780 to its U-turn about a century later, when it went from being just another name for ‘Hindi’ to meaning ‘the opposite of Hindi, the language that is most definitely not Hindi’ – from synonym to antonym. No blame game for Rahman, but scholarly accuracy and detachment. The other source, titled Hindi Nationalism, is of a different nature. Its author, the Indian publicist and university teacher Alok Rai, is more outspoken, more overtly polemical and, truth be told, more fun. He eloquently criticises the ‘Hindiwallahs’, the advocates of a ‘pure’ Hindi who patrol the artificial linguistic border that they themselves have drawn. Rai calls the official languages of India and Pakistan ‘Hindi’ and ‘Urdu’, never omitting the inverted commas, because he strongly feels that these are travesties of the people’s real bhasha (‘language, tongue, speech’). As far as he’s concerned, this real language could be termed Hindi or Urdu or Hindi-Urdu or Urdu-Hindi, without inverted commas (though he seems to dislike the term Hindustani).
The border between India and Pakistan has its absurdities – as does its linguistic equivalent.
In Rahman’s book he approvingly quotes Rai, and if the two were to meet I’m sure they would have discussion without any hostility – though perhaps with considerable passion, especially on Rai’s side, if the heated tone of his book is anything to go by. It’s safe to say that India and Pakistan would both be better off with a number of Rahmans and Rais in high places.
The story of Hirdu_
So what’s the real story of South Asia’s biggest language – the story of ‘Hirdu’, as one exasperated linguist has called it? Nothing special until modern times, frankly. Its early ancestor was an Indo-European language, labelled Proto-Indo-Aryan, whose speakers seem to have reached north Pakistan and north India sometime during the second millennium BCE, spreading further south and east for many centuries thereafter. This statement about the far past comes with the usual caveats and disclaimers, because alternative interpretations exist. One theory, held by several scholars in South Asia but few elsewhere, holds that the Indus Valley, rather than the Ukrainian steppe or Asian Turkey, was the birthplace of the Indo-European family as a whole. But that’s the same damn nationalism piping up again. Let’s ignore it.
As in Europe, where several groups of Indo-European languages spread and then diverged, influenced by the older local tongues, so in South Asia: Indo-Aryan came to dominate a growing area, while at the same time diversifying due to contact with aboriginal languages. In some places, these older languages survive to this day. Remember the Dravidian family, spoken in the south, with Tamil as a prominent member?
In an attempt to come to grips with an otherwise intractable tangle of old tongues, linguists have named the ones spoken from 1500 until 300 BCE ‘Old Indo-Aryan’. That sounds arcane, but the most important member of the group is one we’ve met more than once in this book: Sanskrit – the name, as befits a superstar, means ‘perfect’ or ‘refined’. Its career, and especially that of the variety labelled classical Sanskrit, is strongly reminiscent of classical Latin’s: both languages were deliberately standardised versions of the vernaculars, were mostly used in writing and had a cultural impact that spread far beyond their areas of origin and continues right down to modern times.
On to the next stage: the ‘Middle Indo-Aryan’ group of languages, spoken from 300 BCE to 1500 CE. These are called Prakrits, meaning ‘natural’, for they were the people’s lingos of their day. Meanwhile, Sanskrit remained the written language of choice, again like Latin in the West. In other respects too, India’s linguistic situation around 1000 CE was much like Europe’s. It can be summarised with one of those concepts that linguists would dearly love to be household terms, but aren’t: dialect continuum. Let me explain. A continuum – whether of wavelengths, personality traits or any other phenomenon – is a range characterised by gradual variation. So a dialect continuum is a range of dialects or languages, spoken across a substantial geographical area, with the ones close together being pretty similar, and the ones farther apart being less so. In practical terms, this means that travellers setting out from home can talk to people easily for a few hours or even days, but the further they walk, the harder this gets, without there ever being a steep drop in mutual understanding. Great Britain used to present a dialect continuum, and to a certain degree it still does: hiking from Southampton to Aberdeen, we’ll hear the dialects slowly changing, and even the Scottish border is no sharp linguistic boundary between English and Scots. Welsh and Scottish Gaelic, however, would not be part of the continuum.
This was the situation in South Asia a thousand years ago, except that it had no ‘umbrella’ language the way that we have Standard English. But, given that most people did not travel in those days, the situation hardly ever caused any communication problems. That’s how it used to work in most of the world at the time, including the Germanic, Romance and Slavic zones of Europe and the Indo-Aryan parts of South Asia. In today’s North India, which was the heartland of that extensive zone, there were five closely related Prakrits that can be considered forerunners of Hindustani.
These and most other Prakrits were spoken by the masses and their rulers alike. In the westernmost part, however, west of the Indus River, things were different: while the people spoke Prakrits, their rulers spoke Persian. This situation was a taste of things to come.
1206 and all that
Starting in the eleventh century, growing numbers of invaders, merchants, mendicants and holy men came into India from Persia, and from 1206 onward the political scene was dominated by Muslim dynasties. First, the Delhi Sultanate became the most powerful state of South Asia; later, it was succeeded by the Mughal Empire. The rulers of these states were of Central Asian origin, but had in previous centuries been culturally and linguistically Persianised (as we saw in chapter 15). The Delhi Sultanate was ruled by mostly Turkic dynasties. They introduced the Persian habit of referring to the languages of South Asia as ‘Hindi’, which simply means ‘spoken in the land of the Indus river’ – in other words, Indian. The Mughal emperors were of mixed stock, part Turkic, part Mongol (Mughal is derived from Mongol), but they too spoke Persian. Both empires at their greatest extent reached far south, but neither ever encompassed the whole subcontinent.
What happened to the region’s languages? That would make a nice question in an exam for linguistics undergraduates: ‘Suppose there is a large area with a dialect continuum, which is then dominated for several centuries by a comparatively small ruling class of foreign extraction, who speak a language that is not closely related. What do you expect to happen to the local dialects and to the rulers’ language?’ The answer might be something like: ‘The local dialects (the substratum) will be influenced by the elite language (the superstratum), but in the longer run, the ruling class will first become bilingual and ultimately give up their old language altogether.’ The student need not have thought of India; the question describes equally well what happened in northern Gaul after the Germanic Franks came to dominate it in the late fifth century; what happened in Normandy after the Vikings acquired it in the early tenth century; and what happened in England after these Vikings-turned-Normans conquered it in 1066 – not to mention many similar cases.
How did this play out in South Asia? First of all, throughout the Sultanate and Mughal periods, the local tongues borrowed loads of Persian words, many of which were of Arabic origin, with a few Turkic elements thrown in. It is often claimed that this happened mainly in the military camp or urdu (a Persian word of Turkic origin), but that is incorrect. No matter how much a ruling elite tries to keep itself to itself, it can’t help interacting with the lower classes. Language contact occurred not only in the military camps, but also, probably to a greater extent, in shops and markets, palaces and mosques, taverns and brothels. Through this contact, people would learn and adopt new words. That’s how Hindi-Urdu or Hindustani ended up with a lot of Persian vocabulary, such as JAVĀN for ‘young’, PARDA for ‘curtain’ and DARIĀ for ‘river’ or ‘sea’, and a good deal of Arabic too, such as KITĀB for ‘book’, JAHĀZ for ‘ship’ and DUNIYĀ for ‘world’. Today’s speakers do not regard these words as ‘foreign’ or ‘borrowed’ any more than we think of river, curtain, simple and very as French. (They are derived from RIVIèRE, COURTINE, SIMPLE and VERAI, which in modern French is VRAI.)
And what about the second part of the student’s answer, the one about the elite? Did they become bilingual? Not during the Delhi Sultanate, it seems. But the Mughal court did fairly soon, in the sixteenth century, when the men began to marry Indian noblewomen. For the next two centuries, Persian would slowly lose ground in favour of Hindustani, known at the time as Hindi.
Early Urdu and Hindi, in hindsight
In the seventeenth century, the linguistic situation in South Asia was still fairly unremarkable. No-one at the time could have foreseen the Hindi-Urdu rift. The Middle Indo-Aryan languages had diverged into several New Indo-Aryan languages: Bengali, Punjabi and others, as well as a central group consisting of regional tongues often lumped together as Hindi. Without exception, they were packed with Persian and Arabic words. While classical Sanskrit was still in use for liturgical purposes, the vernaculars were now routinely written, in a variety of scripts (see chapter 6). Muslim authors used the Perso-Arabic script, a variety of the Arabic alphabet; they would be familiar with this through the Koran and state documents. Hindi was written in various indigenous scripts, depending on caste: the Brahmin priests and teachers preferred Nagari; the Kayastha scribes and administrators used Kaithi, which was the more widespread of the two.
