Hindustani grammar

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Part of a series on the
Hindustani language
Hindi Urdu Regional or dialectal variants (Andaman Bihari Bombay Deccani Dhakaiya Hinglish Hyderabadi Judeo-Urdu Kauravi Rekhta Urdish)
History
Hindi–Urdu controversy Persian and Urdu Hindi literature Urdu literature Hindustani orthography
Grammar
Numerals Declension Verbs
Linguistic history
Vocabulary Kinship terms Phonological history
Accessibility
Hindi–Urdu transliteration Hindustani Braille Hindi Braille Urdu Braille Roman Hindi Roman Urdu Indo-Pakistani Sign Language
v t e

Hindustani, the lingua franca of Northern India and Pakistan, has two standardised registers: Hindi and Urdu. Grammatical differences between the two standards are minor but each uses its own script: Hindi uses Devanagari while Urdu uses an extended form of the Perso-Arabic script, typically in the Nastaʿlīq style.

On this grammar page, Hindustani is written in the transcription outlined in Masica (1991). Being "primarily a system of transliteration from the Indian scripts, [and] based in turn upon Sanskrit" (cf. IAST), these are its salient features: subscript dots for retroflex consonants; macrons for etymologically, contrastively long vowels; h for aspirated plosives; and tildes for nasalised vowels.