Hindustani language

Hindustani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken across India's Hindi Belt and Pakistan as the lingua franca of the region. It is also spoken by the Deccani-speaking community in South India. Hindustani is a pluricentric language with two standard registers, known as Hindi (Prakritised and Sanskritised register written in the Brahmic script) and Urdu (Persianised and Arabised register written in the Perso-Arabic script), which serve as official languages of India and Pakistan, respectively. Thus, it is also called Hindi–Urdu. Colloquial registers of the language fall on a spectrum between these standards.

The concept of a Hindustani language as a "unifying language" or "fusion language" that could transcend communal and religious divisions across the subcontinent was endorsed by Mahatma Gandhi, as it was not seen to be associated with either the Hindu or Muslim communities as was the case with Hindi and Urdu respectively, and it was also considered a simpler language for people to learn. The conversion from Hindi to Urdu (or vice versa) is generally achieved by merely transliterating between the two scripts. Translation, on the other hand, is generally only required for religious and literary texts.

Scholars trace the language's first written poetry, in the form of Old Hindi, to the Delhi Sultanate era around the twelfth and thirteenth century. During the period of the Delhi Sultanate, which covered most of today's India, eastern Pakistan, southern Nepal and Bangladesh and which resulted in the Hindu-Muslim cultures, the Prakrit base of Old Hindi became enriched with loanwords from Persian, Arabic and Turkic, evolving into the present form of Hindustani.