> You make it sound like everyday Hindi and everyday Urdu are far apart, but I'm not sure if that's true: if you took a Pakistani Urdu speaker and an Indian Hindi speaker, both from the middle class with only a modest amount of education (and therefore limited access to specialized vocabulary), both would have no trouble at all talking to each other.
Hence this from the parent post: It is only the mash of Hindi-Urdu called Hindustani (popularized in modern day by Bollywood) that's mutually intelligible to both Hindi and Urdu speakers alike, and only in its spoken form.
> And when you ignore vocabulary...
That's the crux of my point. The punjabi dialects vary mostly in phonetics and not so much in vocabulary. In my case Gujarati and Lisan ud Dawat aren't exactly mutually intelligible in spoken form and most def not in their written form. As for Hindi-Urdu, it is mutually intelligible when in its hugely popular Hindustani [0] form, which is what your saying as well, I think.
> I don't think it differs grammatically from everyday Urdu either, with the possible exception of ezafe.
That's one difference that has Perso-Arabic tilt to it. The Urdu/Rekhta literature has other elements [1] that diverge from high Hindi that it couldn't possibly pass off as the same language as Urdu, imo. Exhibit A: https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals Most native Hindi speakers would have trouble parsing through most of those Urdu ghazals, I'd reckon.
> At formal and literary levels, however, vocabulary differences begin to loom much larger (Hindi drawing its higher lexicon from Sanskrit, Urdu from Arabic and Persian), to the point where the two styles/languages become mutually unintelligible.
Exactly. For a language like Lisan ud-Da'wat spoken by a much less number of people, there's a common ground with Gujarati which is simply to speak the main language Gujarati itself, even if the core vocabulary and grammar are similar between the two. The only thing working for Hindi-Urdu mutual intelligibility, imo, is that Hindi is spoken by a large number of people who are exposed to Urdu, on a day to day basis, and vice versa.
I guess, like someone mentioned [2], 'a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.'
Punjabi dialects do vary in vocabulary. Just go to Indian Punjab, and converse with people from Majha, Malwa, Doaba or Poadh. You will instantly find differences. Singers from Majha sometimes use vocab that needs help translating.
Legal vocabulary in the sense of interacting with the court or revenue system (patwaris, thanedars, kotwals) is still strongly mutually intelligible IIRC
> You make it sound like everyday Hindi and everyday Urdu are far apart, but I'm not sure if that's true: if you took a Pakistani Urdu speaker and an Indian Hindi speaker, both from the middle class with only a modest amount of education (and therefore limited access to specialized vocabulary), both would have no trouble at all talking to each other.
Hence this from the parent post: It is only the mash of Hindi-Urdu called Hindustani (popularized in modern day by Bollywood) that's mutually intelligible to both Hindi and Urdu speakers alike, and only in its spoken form.
> And when you ignore vocabulary...
That's the crux of my point. The punjabi dialects vary mostly in phonetics and not so much in vocabulary. In my case Gujarati and Lisan ud Dawat aren't exactly mutually intelligible in spoken form and most def not in their written form. As for Hindi-Urdu, it is mutually intelligible when in its hugely popular Hindustani [0] form, which is what your saying as well, I think.
> I don't think it differs grammatically from everyday Urdu either, with the possible exception of ezafe.
That's one difference that has Perso-Arabic tilt to it. The Urdu/Rekhta literature has other elements [1] that diverge from high Hindi that it couldn't possibly pass off as the same language as Urdu, imo. Exhibit A: https://www.rekhta.org/ghazals Most native Hindi speakers would have trouble parsing through most of those Urdu ghazals, I'd reckon.
> At formal and literary levels, however, vocabulary differences begin to loom much larger (Hindi drawing its higher lexicon from Sanskrit, Urdu from Arabic and Persian), to the point where the two styles/languages become mutually unintelligible.
Exactly. For a language like Lisan ud-Da'wat spoken by a much less number of people, there's a common ground with Gujarati which is simply to speak the main language Gujarati itself, even if the core vocabulary and grammar are similar between the two. The only thing working for Hindi-Urdu mutual intelligibility, imo, is that Hindi is spoken by a large number of people who are exposed to Urdu, on a day to day basis, and vice versa.
I guess, like someone mentioned [2], 'a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.'
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_language
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urdu_alphabet
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6759103