Urdu and Hindi

[Takra jenai]

I'd like to learn Urdu (another language that Malala Yousafzai speaks).

According to Wikipedia

Urdu is mutually intelligible with Standard Hindi

.
so would it be a crime if I used Hindi textbooks as well, if they turned out to be more interesting or more easily available?
Thank you.

[Josquin]

As far as I know, Urdu has more loanwords from Arabic, while a lot of words in Hindi are derived from Sanskrit. I think the languages are highly mutually intelligible, but there are still differences between them. I don't know how bad it would be to use Hindi materials for learning Urdu, but given that India and Pakistan are enemies, Pakistani people probably wouldn't be too thrilled if you spoke Hindi with them instead of "proper" Urdu. Just my two cents though.

[Takra jenai]

Thank you.

Malala Yousafzai (a Pakistani) and Kailash Satyarthi (an Indian) clearly understood one another without an interpreter.
I wouldn't only use Hindi manuals, mostly Urdu ones.

[Josquin]

Malala Yousafzai (a Pakistani) and Kailash Satyarthi (an Indian) clearly understood one another without an interpreter.

That's the definition of "being mutually intelligible".

Just a comparison to make my point clearer: Serbian and Croatian are highly mutually intelligible languages as well. When Yugoslavia still existed, the language used to be referred to as Serbocroatian. It was one language with two varieties, Serbian and Croatian. However, when Yugoslavia disintegrated into several states, which started to wage war against each other, each state declared its variety a language of its own. So, now there are Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and since a few years ago even Montenegrin. Instead of one language, there are now four, which are sometimes referred to as BCMS.

However, how can one language desintegrate into four within a few years? Answer: It can't. While Bosnians, Serbs, and Croatians may use different expressions for some words, their languages are still highly mutually intelligible. A Serb and a Croatian won't need an interpreter, however they'll notice that some words are different. What is the common word in Serbian might be a rare expression in Croatian.

It's pretty much the same with Hindi-Urdu. It used to be one language (Hindustani) which developed into two languages after India and Pakistan became independent. While Pakistani people will understand you when you talk to them in Hindi, they'll notice it's not "proper" Urdu. That might not be a problem for comprehension, but, as I said, the language of the enemy might not have a very high prestige among some people.

[Chung]

I'd like to learn Urdu (another language that Malala Yousafzai speaks).

According to Wikipedia

Urdu is mutually intelligible with Standard Hindi

.
so would it be a crime if I used Hindi textbooks as well, if they turned out to be more interesting or more easily available?
Thank you.

Yes and no. After having asked a couple of Pakistani co-workers about the difference, then from what I gathered is that if your goal is to simply gain some ability to speak and listen to most Indians and Pakistanis, learn whichever one you want and grab whatever course interests you most. There are differences but for native speakers they rarely hinder mutual intelligibility. If your goal is also to learn how to read and write, then you'll need to choose since each variant has its own script. A point that might escape the foreigner is that producers in Indian and Pakistani film ("Bollywood" and "Lollywood" respectively) usually try to make their productions as accessible on the subcontinent as possible. This means that the dialogue and lyrics might upset language purists because they show little use of features that are emblematic of current political divisions.

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As to Josquin's comparison of Hindi-Urdu (I stick to the older "Hindustani") to Serbo-Croatian/Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian, I'd say that after some analysis and use of nominally "Croatian" and "Serbian" courses the latter set almost certainly shows even greater intra-similiarity than Hindustani. Not only is there very high mutual intelligibility, but also very high mutual grammaticality, for lack of a better term. What's correct or grammatical to one native speaker is almost always just so to another even if he/she belongs to a different ethnic group. It often gets to the point where one native speaker who nominally speaks one of these "languages" won't or can't reliably conclude that what another native speaker is using is indeed a distinct language (*psst* it's because they're not languages in the first place, but variants!). Radioclare has a rather funny but telling anecdote on the subject.

Today I had lunch with a friend who lives in Belgrade. I know him via an Esperanto connection but he speaks incredibly good English and we spoke a confusing mixture of all three languages around the table It is many years since I last saw him and he was really surprised that I was learning Croatian/Serbian and that we had chosen to come on holiday to this part of the world.

It was really interesting to hear his views on Serbia and politics. He is someone whose biggest wish is to get out of the Balkans, and he painted quite a grim picture of the country in many respects. He is worried about the future, and whether Serbia ultimately will choose to lean towards Russia or towards the EU. I know we can't discuss politics here, so I won't say more, but I think it was good to listen to his views because sometimes there is a danger that you go on holiday somewhere and just see it through the eyes of a tourist, thinking that everything is rosy, when of course
that is not the case anywhere. On the other hand it is important to remember that people's opinions are just that - opinions - and that there are probably many people in the country who see things very differently from the one or two people you have spoken to. Esperanto-speakers, for example, do not generally represent mainstream political opinions wherever it is that they live. And in this particular instance my friend is not straight so faces certain frustrations in Serbia which the average person on the street may not share.

One anecdote which wasn't political and so I think I can get away with sharing here regards whether Croatian and Serbian are separate languages. He attended a conference in western Europe about 10 years ago which was linked to some Esperanto cultural event, and a representative from a Croatian institute in that country came to give a lecture, the main premise of which was that Croatian is a completely separate language to Serbian and that Croatians and Serbians can't understand each other when they speak. The lecture was given in Croatian and a heritage Croatian-speaker was interpreting to Esperanto for the audience. Partway through the lecture it became apparent that the heritage speaker was really struggling with the task and so my friend stepped it and interpreted for the second half of the lecture. The audience all knew he was from Serbia and they weren't very sympathetic to the nationalist message of the lecture, so they were pretty much in hysterics, much to the confusion of the lecturer. At the end of the talk, he chatted to the lecturer for a while and she thanked him for his help, complimenting him on his excellent Croatian. She was mortified when she asked where he was from and he gave her the name of a small town in eastern Serbia

I regard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian as variants of one language much like American, British, Canadian, and Indian English. The difference is magnified in the nomenclature. The labels "Bosnian", "Croatian", "Montenegrin" and "Serbian" can suggest (especially to the uninitiated) that we're dealing with four languages whose divergence is in line with what one may observe between related but still distinct languages such as "Czech" and "Slovak" or "German" and "Dutch". On the other hand, "American English", "British English", "Canadian English" and "Indian English" are much less likely to suggest that we're dealing with four languages.