Hindi-Urdu
Hindi-Urdu, a language of the Indo-Aryan subbranch of the Indo-European language family, is the third most widely spoken language in the world, with over 300 million speakers. Historically, Hindi and Urdu are descended from the language that was spoken in the area in and around Delhi in North India in the ninth and tenth centuries. This language was given the Persian metonym Hindvi ie. the language of Hind (the land of the Indus river) by the Persian speaking Turks who overran Punjab and the Gangetic plains in the early eleventh century and established the Delhi Sultanate. Hindvi was constructed largely from Sanskrit loan words which had been 'softened' for common speech. It also absorbed Persian, and through Persian, Arabic loan words, and developed as a pidgin form of communication between the newly arrived immigrants and the resident native population of North India. It travelled south and west with merchants and traders and also the army, as the Sultanate expanded beyond the Gangetic plains. From the eighteenth century on, Hindvi began to flower as a literary language. In the course of another century it split into Hindi and Urdu, the former representing a Sanskrit bias and the latter a Persian one. Hindi is written in Devangari script and Urdu in Arabic script.
Sources:
For more information, visit:
Polyglot.lss.wisc.edu
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Central Institute of Indian Languages
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Brahmi descended scripts
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