Hindi–Urdu controversy

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.