Urdu speakers

[Richard Barz]

Perhaps the most straightforward way of looking at the linguistic genealogy
of Hindi and Urdu would be to say that Urdu is a development of the
Indo-Aryan spoken language of Delhi with an addition of Persian vocabulary
(which includes a large proportion of Arabic words).  Hindi stems from 19th
century Urdu written in Devanagari script with the replacement of much
Persian vocabulary with borrowings from Sanskrit.

To the pre-modern literary languages of North India mentioned by  Ruth
Schmidt one should add Maithili.

Richard Barz
ANU
Canberra
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