Hindustani grammar

Common card · No. 414926

Hindustani, the lingua franca of northern India and Pakistan, has two standardised registers: Hindi and Urdu. Grammatical differences between the two standards are minor but each uses its own script: Hindi uses Devanagari while Urdu uses an extended form of the Perso-Arabic script, typically in the Nastaʿlīq style. On this grammar page, Hindustani is written in the transcription outlined in Masica (1991). Being "primarily a system of transliteration from the Indian scripts, [and] based in turn upon Sanskrit" (cf. ISO, IAST), these are its salient features: subscript dots for retroflex consonants; macrons for etymologically contrastive long vowels; h for aspirated plosives; and tildes for nasalised vowels.

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