Dr Tariq Rehman asserts that the language spoken in much of northern India at the time of Muslim incursions into the subcontinent was described as Hindi or Hindui by outsiders, especially Muslim scholars. The great poet and sufi, Amir Khusrau (1253-1324, Turkish father, Indian mother) spoke and wrote in a language he called Hindui. It was the same language that many centuries later in the colonial era came to be known as Hindustani. That name was commonly in use before the partition of India to describe the day-to-day language spoken in northern India and in many other parts of the subcontinent. He rejects the widely held view that Urdu (a Turkish word for a camp or gathering of soldiers) emerged as a new language when men belonging to disparate linguistic nationalities were recruited into Muslim armies and needed a language to communicate. If that were true, Urdu would be a pidgin language, he argues. A pidgin is a reduced language that comes into being from extended contact between groups of people with no common language. Nor is Urdu a creole language. A creole language is an extension of an existing language, which has a core group of native speakers, but becomes considerably simplified as other groups adopt it. He rejects both such descriptions for Urdu, arguing that Urdu has a highly sophisticated structure with distinct grammar and syntax, and that it descends from the Hindu-Muslim cultural synthesis extending over 500 years. During this period, it was used in both the religious and secular literature of Hindus and Muslims. There were of course the Devanagari and Persian scripts in which this common language was written. With regard to the name Urdu, Rehman offers an alternative explanation. Drawing on a vast body of sources he asserts that a number of other names – Hindvi, Hindi, Dihalvi, Khari Boli, Gujri, Dakhani and Rekhta were used for this common language. However, the Muslim elite of Delhi and Agra began to use a particular vocabulary toward the end of the 18th century, which became its distinctive aristocratic features. It was called ‘Zuban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla’ (the language of the Exalted City, i.e. Delhi). Over time that long name shrank simply to Urdu.
[…] Urdu’s ancestor – call it what you will – existed in India (probably in the vicinity of Delhi) as a full language. Words of Persian and Arabic origin crept into it. This was not because of military activities but ordinary everyday interaction. This is a natural process and modern English came about in exactly this manner. That is why about half the vocabulary of English is from Latin and Greek via Norman French.
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