707: Hindustani Nov 14, 2016

If there is Turkistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan Pakistan, and all of those other place-names ending with the -stan suffix in South Central Asia, should there be a Hindustan for the nearby India?—This is a trick -question, as there already is one: a term used to denote the entire Indian subcontinent, but specifically the northern region thereof. Culturally perhaps, the Middle East and India are quite distinct, but this is less of the case linguistically. Starting with the Mughals who once ruled over parts of India without changing the language too greatly aside from the adoption of a few loan words, a new script was introduced which is still used for Urdu and Persian. Over time, different scholars in this region, which is now Pakistan and India, preferred either the native Devanagari or the Persian script. The Urdu writers chose to include more Arabic and Persian words in their work, rejecting Sanskrit-derived words while Hindi writers would do the opposite, but apart from that, that is the biggest difference between Hindi and Urdu. Conversationally are the same language, even though they are attached to two different cultures.