Hindustani historically also known as Hindavi, Dehlvi, and Rekhta, is the lingua franca of North India and Pakistan. It is an Indo-Aryan language, deriving primarily from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi, and incorporates a large amount of vocabulary from Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and Chagatai. It is a pluricentric language, with two official forms, Modern Standard Hindi and Modern Standard Urdu, which are its standardised registers, and which may be called Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu when taken together. The colloquial languages are all but indistinguishable, and even though the official standards are nearly identical in grammar, they differ in literary conventions and in academic and technical vocabulary, with Urdu adopting stronger Persian, Turkic and Arabic influences, and Hindi relying more heavily on Sanskrit.
Before the Partition of India, the terms Hindustani, Urdu, and Hindi were synonymous; all covered what would be called Urdu and Hindi today.
The term Hindustani is still used for the colloquial language and lingua franca of North India and Pakistan, for example for the language of Bollywood films, as well as for several quite different varieties of Hindi spoken outside the Subcontinent, such as Fiji Hindi and the Caribbean Hindustani of Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, Jamaica and South Africa.
History
When the British colonized the Indian subcontinent from the late 18th through to the late 19th century, they used the words ‘Hindustani’, ‘Hindi’ and ‘Urdu’ interchangeably. They developed it as the language of administration of British India, further preparing it to be the official language of modern India and Pakistan. However, with independence, use of the word ‘Hindustani’ declined, being largely replaced by ‘Hindi‘ and ‘Urdu‘, or ‘Hindi-Urdu’ when either of those was too specific. More recently, the word ‘Hindustani’ has been used for the colloquial language of Bollywood films, which are popular in both India and Pakistan and which cannot be unambiguously identified as either Hindi or Urdu.
Find translators – Dulwich Hill, Dundas, Eastgardens, Eastlakes