I have always wondered at the fact that people around the world like to distinguish themselves from other groups although they have so much in common between them and in some cases, even speak the same language! Yes, I'm talking about the variants of the same language which for mostly political and religious reasons have different writing systems and artificially derived lexicon, rendering it mutually unintelligible to its speakers.

I know of a few Indian (and Pakistani) languages that fall in this category: Hindi and Urdu written in Devanagari and Nastaliq scripts respectively; Punjabi written in Gurumukhi and Shahmukhi scripts; and, Sindhi written in Devanagari and Arabic-derived scripts. There could be many more, it could be that I'm not aware of them.

Now consider the case of Hindi and Urdu. These are two languages that share the same grammar, but have or better, have acquired different vocabularies. Standard Hindi, the language of Indian Federal government alongside English, in its formal form, borrows heavily from Sanskrit, said to be the mother of a whole bunch of North-Indian languages. On the other hand, Standard Urdu, Pakistan's national language, in formal writing, borrows significantly from Arabic and Persian. It's to be noted these are the official standards promoted by the respective governments. However, the language of the masses in the northern parts of India and Pakistan is not one of these standards, rather is somewhere in between Urdu and Hindi, a little more tilted toward Urdu, referred to as "Hindustani" by linguists, and is almost perfectly comprehensible to speakers from both the countries. This is the language of Hindi movies, which are immensely popular in Pakistan as well, and Pakistani soap operas. However, if a Pakistani were to listen to the news broadcast in one of India's state-run radio or television channels, it's almost certain that he wouldn't comprehend much of it, thanks to the artificial Sanskrit flavor imparted to it. The same is true for an Indian watching a Pakistan TV newscast.

Having not had any direct experience with Punjabi and Sindhi, I don't want to comment on how different the vocabularies are for these languages as spoken in India and Pakistan, but I'm sure there would be differences--inherent or made-up--given the fact that they are spoken by two different religious groups.

From the above, it could be seen that the aforesaid languages evolved from a common base, but have been moving away from each other since then. The artificially introduced differences are likely to be more and more pronounced with the passage of time and if the governments succeed in their efforts to standardize their languages, variants of the same language like Hindi and Urdu would actually be distinct languages some day.

Why is that the world loves to drift apart rather than coming together instead of nurturing the common heritage and building on it? Does it stem from the basic human thinking that wants to prove the point that he's different from his fellow-beings?

I'd also be interested to know of other languages or variants of the same language that fall in the same category as Hindi and Urdu, divided geopolitically and on religious grounds.. I believe Serbo-Croatian is one. I know that Bahasa Indonesia is a standarized dialect of Malay, but am not sure if the differences are as sharply felt as in the ones above.

I think my post was a bit longwinded. However, please do take some time to read thru this and feel free to post your comments. Thank you!