Re: A New Accent, Political Boundaries and Accents,

Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>But are colloquial Hindi and Urdu really intelligible to monoglot
>speakers of the other language? Urdu is essentially Hindi with most of
>the Prakrit-derived lexicon replaced by Arabic loans... or so I've
>been told.
Funny. I've been told that in many peasant communities in the NW bit of the
subcontinent, the ONLY reliable difference between "Hindu" and "Urdu" is the
religious afiliation of the speaker. Apart from that the only difference is,
supposedly, a tendency to chose different words when discussing lofty things
that doesn't refer directly to the agricultural everyday.

                                                  Andreas

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