زبانیں ज़ुबानेंZubane
Zubane, meaning languages, is a project about the threads that tie Hindi and Urdu to Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, English, and beyond. The premise is simple: people who discover how much vocabulary they already share stop seeing strangers and start seeing cousins. Language can bridge divides that politics cannot.
The app
Five thousand words, ready before you ask
A built-in dictionary of 5,000 Hindustani words — each in Devanagari and true Nastaliq with its meaning, origin, grammatical gender, source form, and the surprising list of languages that share it, from Turkish to Swahili to Indonesian. Instant, offline, and honest: where scholars disagree about an origin, the entry says so.
Ask Zubane anything
Beyond the five thousand, type any Hindi–Urdu word and the app's AI gives it the same full treatment — scripts, origin, story — and saves it to your own list. Every word in every note is tappable, so one lookup wanders into five.
Song breakdowns
Type a Hindi–Urdu song and get its language DNA: where its words come from, what the poetry means, the film, composer, and lyricist behind it, and one-tap links to find it on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. Original commentary, never reproduced lyrics.
Hear it said properly
Every word carries a Hindustani pronunciation button backed by studio-quality neural voices, with each word routed to the voice that says it best — so qismat keeps its qaaf and phool keeps its ph. Articles read themselves aloud too, with a player that can pause, scrub, and speed up to 1.5×.
The nuqta files
फ → फ़ ज → ज़ ख → ख़
One dot changes everything. A full chart pairs 51 Devanagari letters with their Nastaliq equivalents and their sounds, and shows how Devanagari writes borrowed sounds with a single fragile dot while Nastaliq gives each its own letter — a difference that may be quietly steering how millions of people speak.
Yours, in your language
The whole app can run in English, हिन्दी, or اردو — with a full right-to-left flip for Urdu. A word of the day, quiz rounds on meanings and origins, and dark mode throughout. No account, no ads, no tracking; the dictionary works offline.
Get the app
Zubane runs on iPhone, iPad, Android, and Mac.
iPhone and iPad install from the App Store. The Android build is a direct
download while the Google Play listing is in the works — your phone will ask you to allow
installs from your browser. You can
check the download against its published checksum,
607730ea50df0fa971a32e4983c29d0acd715699fc52115ad08eabb3042ad66e.
Five thousand words, right here
The page said the dictionary was ready before you ask, so here it is. Search all 5,000 entries by word, meaning, script, or origin. Each is one Hindustani word written two ways, with where it came from and who else says it.
The word behind this project. Classical Persian says zabaan; much of the subcontinent rounded it to zubaan. Kurdish ziman is family too. See the article on zubaan vs zabaan for the full story.
From the Semitic root k-t-b. Persian kitaab, Turkish kitap, Swahili kitabu, and Hebrew ketav is a cousin. One word, half the planet.
Native stock, with the aspirated ph that rural Punjabi preserves so faithfully: phull, phaTT, phaaTak. The same speakers switch cleanly to f for Farsi and filam. That contrast is the seed of this project's script hypothesis.
A few entries from the set, pre-rendered. Turn on JavaScript to search all 5,000.
From the articles
Why Did F Replace Ph in Modern Hindi?
A sound that did not exist in the subcontinent is quietly taking over. Tracing the merger from the 1800s to your group chat.
The Script Shaped the Sound
Zubane's working hypothesis: Nastaliq protects distinctions that Devanagari's optional dot lets slip.
Zubaan vs Zabaan
Two vowels, one word, and the story behind this project's name.
All articles →About the author
Nipun Dubey builds things at the intersection of technology and language. By day he is the CEO & Co-Founder of HappiNest.AI, an AI leasing copilot that helps property managers significantly reduce costs and improve operations for all things leasing. Before HappiNest he led AI and B2B startups bringing transformational change to legacy industries, worked at leading technology companies, and is a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Zubane is the other thread, and the older one: a lifelong fascination with languages and linguistics, history, and cultural anthropology, and a conviction that showing people how much they already share is the fastest way to connect them. It runs in the family. His grandparents grew up in pre-Partition colonial India, and one grandfather, a renowned professor of Hindi and Indian languages, spent his life teaching the very words this project now traces. Zubane is, among other things, a grandson's continuation of that work.
That fascination did not stop at Hindi and Urdu. Zubane is one of four field guides built on the same conviction, and it makes the boldest version of the claim: that Hindi and Urdu, which people think of as two languages, are really one language wearing two alphabets. Bhashalu argues the opposite and harder case, that Hindi and Telugu come from unrelated language families and handed each other close to a thousand words anyway, and Bhashegalu makes that same case for Hindi and Kannada. Bhashao takes the argument in the middle: Hindi and Gujarati share a parent, so much of their everyday vocabulary is one inherited word worn down two different ways.
Get in touch
hello@zubane.com — corrections, counterexamples, and recordings of your grandparents welcome.
