It's also important to understand that less than half of India speaks hindi/urdu as a native language, and less than a 10th of the country speaks/understands punjabi (which this song is in). There are more speakers of Punjabi in Pakistan than there are in India.
That's interesting, I also forgot to mention that my parents spoke punjabi, and I find myself understanding punjabi more so than hindi. While alike they are very different and often confusing.
Depends on the station. I've heard a bunch of different stuff, but Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali and Gujarati stuff all crops up at least as far as I can tell. I'm also not terribly good at distinguishing them but can tell when I'm hearing Hindi or Urdu.
Interesting that you mention the spectrum of Punjabi - I think I must have been taught some Punjabi-inflected Hindi which was very much like Hindi, and then had other people tell me they're completely different. Makes more sense now.
It's also important to understand that less than half of India speaks hindi/urdu as a native language, and less than a 10th of the country speaks/understands punjabi (which this song is in).
I was working on a Bollywood movie once in New Jersey and got into some of the music. I really like how the language sounds. But all I know in Hindi is how to pick out a cute girl and say "Acha Hey..." (which I learned from the Indian film crew)
precisely. In fact because Urdu is still spoken in parts of India (north & central) AND tends to be the preferred language of scriptwriters & songwriters in Bollywood - a lot of spoken Hindi has picked up a significant Urdu tinge.
> You make it sound like everyday Hindi and everyday Urdu are far apart, but I'm not sure if that's true: if you took a Pakistani Urdu speaker and an Indian Hindi speaker, both from the middle class with only a modest amount of education (and therefore limited access to specialized vocabulary), both would have no trouble at all talking to each other.
Hence this from the parent post: It is only the mash of Hindi-Urdu called Hindustani (popularized in modern day by Bollywood) that's mutually intelligible to both Hindi and Urdu speakers alike, and only in its spoken form.
> And when you ignore vocabulary...
That's the crux of my point. The punjabi dialects vary mostly in phonetics and not so much in vocabulary. In my case Gujarati and Lisan ud Dawat aren't exactly mutually intelligible in spoken form and most def not in their written form. As for Hindi-Urdu, it is mutually intelligible when in its hugely popular Hindustani [0] form, which is what your saying as well, I think.
> I don't think it differs grammatically from everyday Urdu either, with the possible exception of ezafe.
That's one difference that has Perso-Arabic tilt to it. The Urdu/Rekhta literature has other elements [1] that diverge from high Hindi that it couldn't possibly pass off as the same language as Urdu, imo. Exhibit A: https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals Most native Hindi speakers would have trouble parsing through most of those Urdu ghazals, I'd reckon.
> At formal and literary levels, however, vocabulary differences begin to loom much larger (Hindi drawing its higher lexicon from Sanskrit, Urdu from Arabic and Persian), to the point where the two styles/languages become mutually unintelligible.
Exactly. For a language like Lisan ud-Da'wat spoken by a much less number of people, there's a common ground with Gujarati which is simply to speak the main language Gujarati itself, even if the core vocabulary and grammar are similar between the two. The only thing working for Hindi-Urdu mutual intelligibility, imo, is that Hindi is spoken by a large number of people who are exposed to Urdu, on a day to day basis, and vice versa.
I guess, like someone mentioned [2], 'a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.'
Hindi or Urdu? Haha... I always find the "language vs dialect" thing very interesting. The distinction when it comes to Hindi and Urdu is totally political.
Two of my old buddies, one an Indian, the other a Pakistani, could completely understand each other, yet both insisted that they spoke different languages (Punjabi/Hindi and Urdu respectively)
Another friend of mind, who left Pakistan as a 10 year old, always just shook his head with a smile and said "Dude, that's like a guy from Alabama saying someone from England speaks a different language."
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