Chew Lin Kay [22/05/12 12:16 +0800]:
In brief, that phrase is used to separate it from Urdu.
Is there a linguistic/political/geographical/whatever reason why it's not
just called Hindi or Urdu?
religious
urdu derived from languages such as arabic, farsi and turkish, and was a
sort of lingua franca for the mughal armies that came to India, and
included people of various islamic ethnicities (those as well as uzbeks,
tajiqs, pashtuns etc), as well as people drawn from the local population.
It is written in arabic script, but the words are, generally, widely used
in colloquial forms of hindi.
The hindi dialects in several places (cities such as hyderabad and lucknow)
that have a largely mixed population are heavily urdu flavored compared to
the hindi spoken in some other places, so there's a geographic / locational
element as well.
A hindu religious right winger or in some much rarer cases a linguistic
purist will deliberately refrain from using urdu words when he speaks
hindi, and consciously use synonyms for those words that have a sanskrit
etymology
Similarly, narendra modi makes it a point not to use any arabic / urdu
derived words when he speaks gujrati, for much the same reason
If you want a (probably fictitious) analogy closer to home, think of an
umno / pas islamic + malay nationalist type who will deliberately avoid
speaking any version of bahasa that has chinese or tamil words in it
[though the very word bahasa is derived from bhasha, the hindi / sanskrit
word for language..]
srs
