Urdu.—In the past eight centuries, Muham madan armies have been bringing into India the Arabic, Turki, Mongol, and Persian tongues. The first of these continues to be the language of the Muhammadan religion ; and though the Koran has been translated into Persian, Urdu, and Tamil, also Burmese and Malay, their sacred Nok, in the original Arabic, is still preferred in British India, is studied by all youths, and read by. all their educated religionists. Persian, on the other hand, has been the written language of the Muhammadan courts of Persia and India, and is used by all the educated classes in their corre spondence. Under Mahmud, the civil administra tionmust have been entirely conducted by Persians. The two celebrated vizirs, Abfil Abbas and Ahmad Maimendi, were of that nation. The former introduced the practice of writing all public papers in Persian. Ahmad restored Arabic in permanent documents. It is owing to this circumstance that, although India was never directly conquered by Persia, the language of business and of writing in general is all taken from the latter country. The Muhammadan conquerors, whom the Mabrattas first and then the British succeeded, thus left as a legacy the Persian language, as the tongue in which all the learned people, and many of the official people, wrote ; but since the 14th century, from it and from the Turki, Arabic, and Hindi a vernacular language has been formed, to which the name of Urdu, or camp tongue, is given. The new tongue is based on the Hindi, with many words from the Arabic, Persian, and Turki, a sprinkling from the Sanskrit, and all the Hindi, Dravidian, Kolarian and Portuguese tongues spoken in British India. In the south of India, Urdu is called Hindustani, because it had its origin in Northern India or Hindustan ; but it was only in the early part of the 19th century that it was given regular forms by Dr. John Borthwick Gilchrist. It is used as a medium of intercommunication by the Hindus of the towns of Oudh and Dehli, by all Indian Muhammadans amongst themselves, and by Hindus and Euro peans as a common tongue. It is, however, as a written language, only used by the less educated Muhammadans and by their women, the more highly educated employing Persian. In some districts of Northern India, Persian words pre dominate in the Urdu ; in other parts of India, Hindi words are the more numerous'; in the southern part of the Peninsula there is a very considerable admixture of Arabic, and on the west of the Peninsula the Mabrati is greatly infused into it.
_Hindi is a term used over much of Northern India to denote the vernacular tongue of the district. Hindi and its dialects are spoken by about 80 millions of people. On the north and east it comes in contact with the Tibeto-Burman family in the Himalaya and in Further India ; on the south, in Gondwana, it has on its borders the Uriya, the Karnatica, the Telugu, and the Mahrati ; and on the N.W. and W. the Puslitu, the Baluchki, and Brahuiki bound it. Its recog nised dialects are reckoned fifty-eight, but there are others wild and uncultivated.
Speaking generally, the whole of Upper India, including the Panjab, from the Himalaya to the Vindhyan range, but exclusive of Bengal, may be said to be possessed by one language, the Hindi. According to Colebrooke and the Serampore translators of the Bible, Hindi owes nine-tenths of its vocables to Sanskrit roots ; when it is spoken by Muhammadans, who add to it Arabic and Persian roots, it becomes converted into Urdu or Hindustani. When Hindi is spoken by Hindus,
who draw on Sanskrit for enrichment or embellish ment, it appropriately retains the name of Hindi. Modified in these various ways, it is found not only on the plains of Hindustan, but also on the southern slope of the Himalaya, for Mr. Trail informs us that the language of Kamaon and Garhwal is Hindi. Indeed, generally, along the Sub-Himalayan range, as far as the Gogra river, an impure Hindi dialect introduced by the Gurkha from the plains appears to be extirpating the vernacular Tibetan tongues of the aboriginal mountaineers. Mr. Masson says that by means of Hindi ho made himself understood throughout the whole of the Kohistan, and it will thus be seen that the term is used to bring under one common designation the various dialects of a language essentially one, but which has received no great cultivation in any of its forms. Accord ing to the Brahman pandits of Benares, there are hundreds of dialects equally entitled to the mune. The Brij Basha (or Bhaka, as it is pro nounced on the Gauges) and the Panjabi are the two most cultivated varieties of it, but the Panjabi passes into Mullein, which a good philo logist has shown to be a corrupted form of Panjabi ; whilst Jataki, again, farther to the south, is a corrupted form of Multani ; Sindi, according to Lieutenant Burton, is a perfectly distinct dialect, though directly derived from Sanskrit. When the Mahrattas extended their conquests into Ilindustan, they found Hindi everywhere prevalent, from the limits of the desert to the frontiers of Bundelkhand ; and finding it different from their own tongue, they called it contemptuously Rangri Basha, quasi barbarous jargon. Sir John Malcolm extends tho Rangri Bhaka as far west as the Indus, and east as far as the frontier of Bundelkhand, where, as in all the country to the Indus, from the western frontier of Bengal, dialects of Hindi prevail. The Marwari and other dialects of Rajputana are varieties of Hindi introduced by the Rajput races.
The Bible has been translated into Hindi, the Nagari and Kaithi characters being used.
The Gujerati, a Sanskritoid language, is spoken throughout that peninsula, and has been adopted by the Parsee religionists.
Konkani has three dialects, a northern, a southern in Goa territory, and a third used by a particular class of the inhabitants of S. Canara.
A[alealam extends from Cape Comorin to the Chandragiri river, or, more strictly, perhaps, to Nileshwar (Nileswara), where a Nair raja, conquered by Hyder, formerly ruled. Mr. Cust (p. 70) tells us that it is peculiarly related to and geographically intermixed with the Tamil. A dialect of it is spoken on the western slopes of the Animallay Hills by wild forest tribes, and a remarkable one by the Mappilla or Moplah race of the western coast, and the inhabitants of the Laccadive Islands, with an adapted Arabic character, used by all educated Mappilla Muham =dans, except those who retain Vatteluttu or old Tamil-Malealam character. This dialect must have been formed a thousand years ago ; it has a literature of its own, and sub-dialects.