Talk:Urdu

Make it Clear: Mutual Intelligibility of Urdu with Hindi, but not Urdu with Arabic and Persian/Farsi

Dear all and To editor Fowler&fowler:,

Urdu being a form of standard register of Hindustani, is mutually intelligible with Hindi as they share the grammar, construction, conjunctions ... and even the accent, they are linguistically same language even though "the large religious and political differences make much of the little linguistic differences (between Urdu and Hindi)", see reference

An Introduction to Sociolinguistics By Ronald Wardhaugh, Janet M. Fuller, Wiley & Sons. 2015. pp30]. Hindi and Urdu are not mutually intelligible with Arabic or Persian. Even Hindi has loan words from English and writing Hindi in Latin script does not make it mutually intelligible with Latin, English or French. None of these four are mutually intelligible, all are from Indo-European family and last three use Latin script. Even Hindi is not mutually intelligible with Sanskrit from which it draws heavily and shares the Devnagri script with. In fact variations of Arabic, though they sue same nastaliq script, are not mutually intelligible with each other, let alone being mutually intelligible with Urdu. See this reference The article mentions that Urdu draws from Hindi, Arabic and Persian. Article also makes it clear that Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible, this needs to be made clear that urdu is not mutual intelligibility with Arabic and Persian.

It will also be useful to include the reason why Urdu is mutually intelligible with Hindi and not with Arabic and Persian. "two closely related and by and large mutually intelligible speech varieties may be considered separate languages if they are subject to separate institutionalisation contexts, e.g. official speech forms of different states and state institutions, or of different religious ethinic communities. Examples of such language paris are Norwegian and Swedish, Hindi and Urdu", see reference The same source further clarifies that, "on the other hand, speech varieties that differ considerably in structure and are not always mutually intelligible, such as Moroccan Arabic, Yemeni Arabic and Lebanese Arabic." Those who want to understand the concept of mutual intelligibility in more detail please refer to this source, last para on page to page 8 and separate language versus dialect and this.

I suggest the following: 1. include the statement upfront (the current unofficial "exec summary" type section on top) that while Urdu is mutually intelligible with Hindi but not with other. 2. include a subheading in the article to discuss the mutual intelligibility of urdu with languages it borrows from. The central logic being that the "base" of Urdu is Khadiboli (Hindustani), and there are other toppings added to it including Hindi, Arabic, Persian and Chagatai, etc. Among those it is MI with Hindustani and not with the rest for the reasons mentioned above. The concept of Hindi and Urdu being two language could politically motivated but their mutual intelligibility is not subject to the political consideration but to linguistic considerations.

Discuss it here please.

Thanks Being.human (talk)

References

Semi-protected edit request on 12 March 2023

Native to Pakistan not India 205.209.65.233 (talk) 14:02, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. M.Bitton (talk) 14:41, 12 March 2023 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 24 March 2023

Urdu has seen a surge of hate among the hinduvta extremist in India, where Urdu is only perceived as a 'Muslim Language' Sania118272 (talk) 10:33, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

 Not done: it's not clear what changes you want to be made. Please mention the specific changes in a "change X to Y" format and provide a reliable source if appropriate. M.Bitton (talk) 12:34, 24 March 2023 (UTC)

References

Query

sir, why my addition has been reverted? Abirtel (talk) 16:38, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

You will need a better source than a 1847 dictionary in support of the statement. It's from a time when the terms "Urdu" and "Hindi" just started to acquire their present meanings. So we cannot take his statement "The Urdú is seldom written in the Déb-nágarí (p. iv)" at face value. –Austronesier (talk) 16:54, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

As Austronesier says, you need a more recent source. Also, the dictionary, which is available online, doesn't say that Urdu was written in the Devanagari script. Even if it did, it wouldn't count as a WP:RS.RegentsPark (comment) 21:59, 29 April 2023 (UTC)

Ethnicity section

The use ethnicity section in this article does not seem valid. Urdu is a language that is spoken fluently throughout Pakistan and northern Indian and it is generally not associated with an ethnic group. An example would be Hindi, spoken fluently throughout northern India and is not associated with any ethnic group (and no ethnic group is mentioned in its Wikipedia article). Therefore, the ethnicity section should be removed from this article as it is quite misleading. Thanks :) PeoplesRepublicOfChina01 (talk) 16:45, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Merger of the article into main Urdu article

The Urdu language has a wide and diverse group of fluent speakers, just like Hindi. The article, Urdu-speaking people complicates things instead of being useful, as there is no ethnic or ethnolingusitic group of Urdu-speakers as they are wide spread diverse group of people with various ethnic and regional identities. I suggest the merger of Urdu-speaking people article into this article, its situation is exactly like Hindi's, whose speakers do not form an ethnic or regional identity as other neighbouring regions. PeoplesRepublicOfChina01 (talk) 12:07, 9 June 2023 (UTC)

The merger has been completed and a new sub page has been added to this article. PeoplesRepublicOfChina01 (talk) 12:29, 9 June 2023 (UTC)