If Bhojpuri Is Hindi, What Is Urdu?

Two tongues of fifty million speakers each. The census files one under Hindi and gives the other its own line.

The Indian census counts languages by asking people their mother tongue, the language their mother spoke to them in childhood. Under the heading Hindi it groups fifty-six named mother tongues: Awadhi, Bagheli, Bundeli, Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, and dozens more, down to varieties of barely ten thousand speakers. All of them fold into the 528 million the census records for Hindi.

Now look at two lines of that ledger. Bhojpuri was returned, as census forms put it, by 50.6 million people in 2011; it is counted inside Hindi. Urdu was returned by 50.8 million and stands apart as one of India's scheduled languages; Pakistan's constitution, for its part, names it the national language. Two speech communities of almost identical size. On the census page, one is a subtotal; the other is a language.

Then ask what the ear hears. Awadhi is the tongue of Tulsidas and his Ramcharitmanas. Bhojpuri has a film industry of its own. Both differ from standard Hindi in real, systematic ways: their own vowel habits, their own verb endings, their own words. A 2011 study of seven such varieties (see The Guests Stayed in the City) found each with a sound personality of its own. Everyday spoken Urdu differs from standard Hindi in almost none of these ways. Both standards stand on the same Delhi vernacular, Khari Boli. The scholar Colin Masica calls them two literary styles of a single subdialect, at the colloquial level virtually identical in grammar and core vocabulary. Early Hindi prose, he notes, was consciously built on the basis of Urdu. The differences live in script and in the learned words each style reaches for.

The old quip, popularized by the Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich, says a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. The census ledger is many things, but it is not a hearing test. Bhojpuri speakers have long campaigned for recognition as a language in its own right, and the phonology gives them a case. None of this argues for taking anyone's line away; a census line carries schools, airtime, and standing, and Urdu has earned its own twice over. The ledger records history and politics. The ear is the other instrument, and it has always filed Hindi and Urdu together.