Hindi or Urdu
I recently sent this post in a group on the subject of purity of Hindi, which so many of us mistakenly support...... No spoken language can be purified artificially. In and around Delhi, a spoken form started emerging some eight hundred years ago, developing basically on the Khadi Boli. The Grammar remained inherently akin to Khadi Boli (retaining the distorted words from Sanskrit which already existed); words from Persian, Arabic and Turkic languages kept getting assimilated. This spoken language was variously called Rekhta, Hindi, Urdu, Hindustani etc. There was no such individual language as Hindi in eighteenth century of Meer Taqi Meer, when the language started getting literary inputs. (the languages of Tulsi and Sur are taught as Hindi today but these were basically Avadhi and Braj. Khadi Boli, by the way, did not have a strong literary tradition and Braj was the language of choice for lettered people) Later, with the advent ...