Hindustani-speaking world

The Hindustani-speaking world refers to the areas where the Hindustani language is spoken. This includes places where Hindustani's standards such as Standard Hindi, Standard Urdu, or regional varieties, is used as an official, administrative, cultural, or commonly spoken language.

Background

The Hindustani language developed in medieval India through contact between different linguistic and cultural groups. It was influenced by Indo-Aryan, Iranian, Arabic, and Turkic languages, especially during the Mughal Empire. Today, it has two standard forms: Hindi, written in the Devanagari script, and Urdu, written in the Perso-Arabic script. Both forms have similar grammar and much shared vocabulary, so speakers of one can usually understand the other.[3][4]

The idea of Hindustani as a "unifying" or "fusion" language that transcends communal and religious divisions across the Indian subcontinent was strongly supported by Mahatma Gandhi. Unlike Hindi, often associated with the Hindu community, and Urdu, linked with the Muslim community, Hindustani was seen as a neutral medium belonging to all. It was also considered simpler and more accessible for the general population to learn. Translation between Hindi and Urdu typically involves transliteration between their scripts—Devanagari and Perso-Arabic—since the spoken language is largely mutually intelligible. Full translation is generally only needed for religious or literary texts that use domain-specific vocabulary.[5][6][7][8]

Before 1947, Hindustani was officially recognized by the British Raj. However, after independence, the term "Hindustani" gradually fell out of official use and today holds no formal status in either India or Pakistan. Instead, the language is officially acknowledged through its standardized forms - Hindi in India and Urdu in Pakistan.[9][10][11][12][13][14]

As of 2023, Hindi and Urdu together, collectively referred to as Hindustani, constitute the third-most spoken language in the world after English and Mandarin, with approximately 843 million native and second-language speakers, according to Ethnologue. In 1995, the number of Hindi–Urdu speakers was around 300 million, already placing Hindustani among the top three most spoken languages globally.[15]

Statistics

Native speakers of the Hindustani language by country
Country or territory Number % Status Notes & References
 Afghanistan 829,000 2% Minority Language [16]
 Fiji 460,000 37.6% Official Language (Hindi) [17]
 Mauritius 79,539 6.1% Minority Language Bhojpuri is considered a dialect of Hindustani.[18]
 India 579,119,824 48% Official Language (Hindi)

Scheduled Language (Urdu) 		Total native speakers of Hindi & Urdu.
 Pakistan 22,332,193 9.3% National Language (Urdu)
 UAE 441,000 4.2% Court Language (Hindi) [16][18]
 Canada 321,465 0.9% Minority Language
 Trinidad and Tobago 61,000 4.4% Minority Language Trinidadian Hindustani[19][18]
 Jamaica 54,000 1.9% Minority Language [18]
 Suriname 150,000 24% Minority Language Sarnámi Hindustáni[20]
 French Guiana 6,000 1.9% Minority Language [18]
   Nepal 870,399 3% Minority Language Awadhi and Bhojpuri are considered separate in Nepal's Census.[21][16]
 Saudi Arabia 845,000 2.1% Minority Language
 Australia 221,684 0.8% Minority Language [22]
 New Zealand 84,000 1.6% Minority Language [18]
 United Kingdom 344,654 0.5% Minority Language [23][24]
 United States 1,372,802 0.4% Minority Language [25]
Total 484,630,000 5.9% - -

References

  1. ↑ "Hindi - Worldwide distribution". Worlddata.info. Retrieved 2025-04-07.
  2. ↑ "Urdu - Worldwide distribution". Worlddata.info. Retrieved 2025-04-07.
  3. ↑ "The Problem of Hindustani (1931), by Tara Chand". franpritchett.com. Retrieved 2025-04-07.
  4. ↑ "Urdu alphabet, pronunciation and language". www.omniglot.com. Retrieved 2025-04-07.
  5. ↑ "After experiments with Hindi as national language, how Gandhi changed his mind". Prabhu Mallikarjunan. The Feral. 3 October 2019.
  6. ↑ Bhat, Riyaz Ahmad; Bhat, Irshad Ahmad; Sharma, Dipti Misra (2017-01-20). "Improving Transition-Based Dependency Parsing of Hindi and Urdu by Modeling Syntactically Relevant Phenomena". ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing. 16 (3): 1–35. doi:10.1145/3005447. ISSN 2375-4699.
  7. ↑ Rai, Alok. "The Persistence of Hindustani". ResearchGate.
  8. ↑ Lelyveld, David (1993-01-01). "Colonial knowledge and the fate of Hindustani". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 35 (4): 665–682. doi:10.1017/S0010417500018661.
  9. ↑ Lelyveld, David (October 1993). "Colonial Knowledge and the Fate of Hindustani". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 35 (4): 665–682. doi:10.1017/S0010417500018661. ISSN 0010-4175.
  10. ↑ Dalby, Andrew (2012). Dictionary of languages: the definitive reference to more than 400 languages. Credo Reference (Firm). London [Eng.]: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-0-7136-7841-3.
  11. ↑ Vejdani, Farzin (2015). Making history in Iran: education, nationalism, and print culture. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-9153-3.
  12. ↑ Everaert, Christine (2010). Tracing the boundaries between Hindi and Urdu: lost and added in translation between 20th century short stories. Brill's Indological library. Leiden ; Boston: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-17731-4. OCLC 463454523.
  13. ↑ The wonder that is Urdu: a multidisciplinary analysis. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. 2022. ISBN 978-81-208-4301-1.
  14. ↑ Bayly, Christopher Alan; Johnson, Gordon (2003). Indian society and the making of the British Empire. The new Cambridge history of India / general ed. Gordon Johnson 2, Indian states and the transition to colonialism (7. pr ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. ISBN 978-0-521-25092-4.
  15. ↑ "What are the top 200 most spoken languages?". Ethnologue (Free All). Retrieved 2025-04-07.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 16.2 "Urdu - Worldwide distribution". Worlddata.info. Retrieved 2025-04-08.
  17. ↑ Tschentscher, Axel. "ICL > Fiji > Constitution". www.servat.unibe.ch. Retrieved 2025-03-09.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 18.3 18.4 18.5 "Hindi - Worldwide distribution". Worlddata.info. Retrieved 2025-04-08.
  19. ↑ Frawley, William (2003). International Encyclopedia of Linguistics: 4-Volume Set. Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN 978-0-19-513977-8.
  20. ↑ "CARICOM CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMME (CCDP)" (PDF). archive.ph. 2017-06-27. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2017-06-27. Retrieved 2025-03-10.
  21. ↑ "जनगणनाको पहिलो दिन पेन्सिलले लेखेको पाइयो,सहि तथ्यांक आउनेमा आशंका - चिसेफायू". 2021-11-17. Archived from the original on 2021-11-17. Retrieved 2025-03-10.
  22. ↑ "Cultural diversity: Census, 2021 | Australian Bureau of Statistics". www.abs.gov.au. 2022-01-12. Retrieved 2025-03-10.
  23. ↑ "Scotland's Census at a glance: Languages". Scotland's Census. Retrieved 2025-03-10.
  24. ↑ "Language, England and Wales - Office for National Statistics". www.ons.gov.uk. Retrieved 2025-03-10.
  25. ↑ "Explore Census Data". data.census.gov. Retrieved 2025-03-10.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.