The Hindi–Urdu controversy was a dispute that arose in 19th-century British India over whether Modern Standard Hindi or Standard Urdu should be chosen as a national language. It is considered one of the leading Hindu–Muslim issues of British India.
Hindi and Urdu are mutually intelligible standard registers of the Hindustani language (also known as Hindi–Urdu). The respective writing systems used to write the language, however, are different: Hindi is written in the Devanagari variant of the Brahmic scripts whereas Urdu is written using a modified Nastaliq variant of the Arabic script, each of which is completely unintelligible to readers literate only in one or the other. Both Modern Standard Hindi and Urdu are literary forms of the Dehlavi dialect of Hindustani. A Persianised variant of Hindustani began to take shape during the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526) and Mughal Empire (1526–1858) in South Asia. Known as Deccani in South India, and by names such as Hindi, Hindavi, and Hindustani in North India and elsewhere, it emerged as a lingua franca across much of Northern India and was written in several scripts including Devanagari, Perso-Arabic, Kaithi, and Gurmukhi.
