The Arabic Language

17.6 Arabic in the Indian subcontinent
Contacts between the Islamic world and India go back as far as the ninth century, 
when Muslim traders ventured east, to India and China. The Islamicisation of the 
Indus valley took place much later, when it was conquered by the dynasty of the 
Ghaznavids in the eleventh century. The Ghaznavids, whose centre was Ghazna 
in Afghanistan, spoke Persian and, just like most dynasties in this area, used 
Persian as their literary language. The founder of the Mughal empire in 1526, 
Bābur, himself wrote in Chagatay Turkic, but at the Mughal court the literary 
language remained Persian, while the colloquial language was Urdu (also called 
Hindawi or Hindi), a Prākrit dialect from North India. Urdu had been used as the 
language of communication between Hindus and Muslims from the time of the 
Ghaznavids, and under the Mughal emperors it even became the medium of a 
vernacular literature. Because of the prestige of Persian, a large number of loans 
from that language entered Urdu during this period.

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With the advent of the English, the harmonious relation between the langu -
ages, the vernacular and Persian, was disturbed, and the language question 
became a controversial issue. While in the western provinces the use of Urdu in 
Arabic–Persian characters was accepted even by Hindus, in the eastern provinces 
Hindus propagated the use of the same language, but under the name of Hindi, 
written in Devanagari characters. The matter of the script became the focus of the 
discussions. Eventually, Devanagari was adopted in India, and the Arabic script 
remained in use in Pakistan. For the representation of Urdu phonemes, a number 
of characters were added to the alphabet, for example, for 
č
, 
ž
, 
g
, 
p
; the represen
-
tation of retroflex consonants by a superscript 
ṭ
, and of aspirated consonants by 
a following 
h
has been mentioned above.
With the Partition between Pakistan and India in 1947, the two varieties of 
the language were separated, too. Urdu became the official language of Pakistan 
and of some Muslims in north-west India, and retained its Arabic–Persian vocab-
ulary, while Hindi became one of the two official languages of India (together 
with English). Hindus started a campaign to purify Hindi and replace the Arabic–
Persian loans with words derived from Sanskrit. Modern literary Hindi has ousted 
a large part of the Persian vocabulary, but in the more colloquial registers of the 
language some of these words are still used.
Since the grammatical structure of Urdu and Hindi is practically identical, 
the difference between them is almost entirely lexical. There is a large number 
of synonym pairs, of which the Sanskrit word is used in literary Hindi and the 
Persian–Arabic word in colloquial Hindi and in Urdu, for example, 
uttar
(S.)/
javāb
(P./A.) ‘answer’; 
ṛtu
(S.)/
mausim
(P./A.) ‘season, weather’; 
ghar
(S.)/
makān
(P./A.) 
‘house’ (Arabic ‘place’); 
pustak
(S.)/
kitāb
(P./A.) ‘book’. It appears that all Arabic 
words passed through Persian before being introduced to Urdu, together with a 
large number of originally Persian words. This even applies to those Arabic words 
which were borrowed both in the singular and the plural form, for example, 
akhbār
‘newspaper’ (< 
ʾaḫbār
, plural of Arabic 
ḫabar
‘news’); 
asbāb
‘tools, luggage’ 
(< 
ʾasbāb
, plural of Arabic 
sabab
‘reason’). In Urdu, such plurals are usually treated 
as singular words. Arabic plurals in 
-īn
(e.g., 
hāzirīn
‘public, audience’ < Persian < 
Arabic 
ḥāḍirīn
) and 
-āt
(e.g., 
dehāt
‘villages, the countryside’ < Persian 
dehāt
) are 
distinguished from originally Urdu words in that they do not take the oblique 
marker 
-õ
.
Just like Persian, Urdu contains a considerable number of prepositions, adver
-
bial expressions and conjunctions taken from Arabic. It appears that in these 
categories, too, there was no independent borrowing from Arabic, but Persian 
always acted as the channel through which these words passed, for example, 
lekin
‘but’, 
va
‘and’, 
balke
‘but on the contrary’ (< Arabic 
bal
+ Persian 
ke
); 
taqriban
‘approximately’ (< Arabic 
taqrīban
), 
fauran
‘at once’ (< Arabic 
fawran
); 
bilkul
‘entirely’ 
(Arabic 
bi-l-kull
); 
barkhilāf
‘contrary to’ (< Arabic 
ḫilāf
‘difference’), 
bāvajūd
‘in spite 
of’ (Arabic 
wujūd
‘existence’) and so on.

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328
The Arabic Language
In Urdu, as in Persian and Turkish, no Arabic verbs appear to have been 
borrowed, probably because of the morphological complexity of the Arabic verb, 
which prohibited morphological integration. Instead, verbo-nominal compounds 
are made with the help of the dummy verb 
karnā
‘to do’, possibly under the 
influence of the Persian verb 
kardan
(cf. above), although similar compounds are 
made with Sanskrit words, for example, 
intazar karnā
/
pratīkṣā karnā
‘to wait for 
someone’ (< Arabic 
intiẓār
, verbal noun of 
intaẓara
‘to wait, to expect’),
 inkār karnā
‘to refuse’ (< Arabic 
ʾinkār
‘refusal’). Passives are made with the verb 
honā
‘to be, to 
become’, for example, 
khātam honā
/
samāpt honā
‘to be finished’ (< Arabic 
ḫātam
). 
Other verbs are also used occasionally, such as 
denā
‘to give’ (e.g.,
 javāb denā
‘to 
give an answer’ < Arabic 
jawāb
‘answer’), or 
lenā
‘to take’ (e.g., 
badlā lenā
‘to take 
vengeance’ < Arabic 
badla
‘replacement, compensation’).
The impact of Arabic and Persian on other modern Indian languages strongly 
correlates with the degree of Islamicisation which their speakers underwent. The 
two varieties of Bengali, spoken both in the Indian province of Bengal and in 
Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, but an independent state since 1971, differ 
considerably in their lexicon. In Bangladesh, which is predominantly Muslim, 
there is a growing tendency to replace older Sanskrit words with Arabic–Persian 
loans, especially in the domain of religion. In West Bengali, the literary language 
(
sādhu-bhāṣā
) contains few loanwords, but in the colloquial language (
calit-bhāṣā
) 
some Sanskrit words have an Arabic–Persian synonym (e.g., 
š
o
bad
vs 
kh
o
bor
(< 
Arabic 
ḫabar
) ‘news’, or 
prakar
versus 
buruj
(< Arabic 
burj
) ‘fortress’).
The trading network in the Indian Ocean was another source for the spreading 
of Islam and Arabic loanwords. Since the beginning of the second millennium 
ce
, 
traders from South Arabia had been in contact with speakers of Tamil and other 
Dravidian languages spoken in South India. Through these contacts, a number of 
Arabic loanwords entered Tamil, most of them in the religious or administrative 
domain, for example, 
curattu 
‘sura’ (< Arabic 
sūra
). Some common words have also 
been borrowed from Arabic, especially in dialects spoken by Muslims, for example, 
mauttu 
‘death’ (< Arabic 
mawt
). The ending 
-u
is the result of internal phonological 
rules in Tamil and has nothing to do with case endings in Arabic. Tschacher (2009: 
434) makes the valid point that since there is independent motivation for this 
change in Tamil, it is likely the intermediary source for a similar ending in Arabic 
loanwords in Indonesian (see below). This may also be the case for the lateral 
reflexes of Arabic /ḍ/ and /ḏ̣/ in Tamil, for example, 
parulu
‘duty’ (< Arabic 
farḍ
); 
perhaps this lateral realisation goes back to the fact that the early traders mostly 
came from South Arabia (see below, p. 330). In contemporary Tamilnadu, a variety 
of Arabic script is still used for an extensive Muslim literature in Tamil, known 
as Arwi.

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