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.
