Most people speak something in the middle, and this is what the term Hindustani is frequently used to mean today. In contemporary times, there is a continuum of Hindi–Urdu, with heavily-Persianised Urdu at one end and Sanskritised Hindi at the other, although the basic grammar remains identical. Persian words in common parlance were slowly replaced by Sanskrit words, sometimes borrowed wholesale, or in new compounds. A return to Hindi poets such as Tulsidas resulted in what is known as a Sanskritisation of the language. Persian-Arabian vocabulary began to be excised from the official Standard Hindi corpus of India in a bid to make the language more "Indian". This state of affairs continued until the Partition of India in 1947, when Hindustani/Urdu continued as an official language of India and Pakistan but renamed Hindi in India and Urdu in Pakistan. Standard forms of Hindi-Urdu In the Hindi-speaking areas, the prestige dialect was long Braj Bhasha, but this was replaced in the 19th century by Khari Boli–based Hindustani, commonly known as Urdu. The Indo-Aryan prakrits also gave rise to languages like Gujarati, Assamese, Bengali, Oriya, Nepali, Marathi, and Punjabi, which are not considered to be Hindi despite being part of the same dialect continuum. However, the term Hindi is also used for most of the central Indic dialects from Bihar to Rajasthan. What is called "Hindi" in India is frequently Standard Hindi, the Sanskrit-ized version of the colloquial Hindustani spoken in the Delhi area since the Mughals. New Indo-Aryan Dialect continuum The Indic languages of Northern India (that includes Assam Valley as for the language Assamese) and Pakistan form a dialect continuum. The two largest languages that formed from Apabhramsa were Bengali and Hindi others include Gujarati, Oriya, Marathi, and Punjabi. This Indo-Aryan language is a combination with Persian elements in its vocabulary, with the grammar of the local dialects. However, Persian was soon displaced by Urdu. Under the flourishing Mughal empire, Persian became very influential as the language of prestige of the Islamic courts. The next major milestone occurred with the Muslim invasions of India in the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. Some of these dialects showed considerable literary production the Sravakachar of Devasena (dated to the 930s) is now considered to be the first Hindi book. "Apabhramsa" is the conventional cover term for transitional dialects connecting late Middle Indic with early Modern Indic, spanning roughly the 6th to 13th centuries. By medieval times, the prakrits had diversified into various Middle Indic dialects. The oldest attested prakrits (i.e., middle Indic languages) are the Buddhist and Jain canonical languages Pali and Ardha Magadhi, respectively. Middle Indo-Aryan Outside the learned sphere of Sanskrit, vernacular dialects (Prakrits) continued to evolve. In about the 4th century BCE, the Sanskrit language was codified and standardized by the grammarian Panini, called "Classical Sanskrit" by convention. The Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni is of similar age as the Rigveda (and almost identical to it), but the only evidence is a number of loanwords. History Indian subcontinent Old Indo-Aryan The earliest evidence of the group is from Vedic Sanskrit, the language used in the ancient preserved texts of the Indian subcontinent, the foundational canon of Hinduism known as the Vedas. They form a subgroup of the Indo-Iranian languages, which consists of two other language groups: the Iranian and Nuristani. Indo-Aryan speakers form about one half (approx 1.5 billion) of all Indo-European speakers (approx 3 billion), The largest in terms of native speakers being Hindustani (Standard Hindi and Urdu, about 240 million), Bengali (about 230 million), Punjabi (about 90 million), Marathi (about 70 million), Gujarati (about 45 million), Oriya (about 30 million), Sindhi (about 20 million), Nepali (about 14 million), Sinhala (about 16 million), Saraiki (about 14 million) and Assamese (about 13 million) with a total number of native speakers of more than 900 million. The Indo-Aryan languages (within the context of Indo-European studies also Indic ) constitutes a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family. Outside of the scope of the map is the migratory Romani language). Geographical distribution of the major Indo-Aryan languages (Urdu is not shown because it is mainly a lingua franca with no prevalence as a first language. some Hindi) Southern Zone Insular Indo-Aryan Indo-aryans Indo-Aryan languages Indo-Aryan Indic Geographic distribution: References Article Sources and Contributors PDF generated using the open source mwlib toolkit.