বাংলা

Bangla is an Indo-Aryan language which evolved from a vernacular closely related to Sanskrit spoken by more than 300 million people in India, Bangladesh and the Diaspora.   Old Bangla emerges as early as 1000 AD in the Eastern Branch of Indic languages. It enriches its vocabulary from Sanskrit and Perso-Arabic sources to serve the ever increasing communication and administrative needs during the Muslim rule in Bengal as well as expanded public participation in religious life due to the bhakti and sufi movements. Native speakers distinguish banglaa designating the language and bengaalii – the speaker. 21 February is celebrated as Language Day in Bangladesh. Colcutta was the capital of British India which stimulated the development of standard Bangla with several registers related to media, politics, administration and academia. The language is written in the Bangla alpha-syllabic writing system, a member of the devanaagarii family.

हिन्दी اُردُو‎ 

Hindi and Urdu are Indo-Aryan languages which developed from the KhaRi bolii dialect spoken in the Delhi region of northern India. They share the same grammatical core and most of the basic vocabulary of everyday speech. The poetry of Amiir Khusrau is (1263-1325) written in a mixed style spoken in Delhi, which is considered the beginning of literary Urdu and Standard Modern Hindi. The two languages were written interchangeably in Nastaliq and Devanagari until the beginning of the 20th century, but after time they developed as two separate languages in terms of script, higher registers and cultural environment. After the Partition in 1947, Urdu became the national language of Pakistan and Hindi one of the two official languages of India along with English.

हिन्दी 

Hindi is the second largest language in the world spoken as a native or a second language. Hindi is written in the Devanagari script that it shares with Sanskrit. It is spoken mostly in the so-called ‘Hindi belt’ — in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Haryana, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh and Delhi. Non-standard varieties of Hindi are found in large urban areas across India. Hindi is also spoken by millions of people in the worldwide Indian diaspora — Guyana, Surinam, Mauritius, Fijji, Trinidad, throughout Europe, the United States and Canada. There are two main groups of Hindi dialects: (a) western group, including Braj, Bundeli, Harianvi, Kanauji and Hindustani or Kauravi; (b) eastern group, including Avadhi, Bagheli and Chhattisgarhi. In addition, the dialect Dakhini (called also Dakhini Hindi or Dakhini Urdu) is centered in Hyderabad. Modern Standard Hindi is relatively young, dating back to early 19 century. However, literature in Hindi-like New Indo-Aryan dialect DiNgal (related closely to Apabhramsa) emerges between 12-14th centuries in Rajasthan, namely in the bardic epics, and raasau poetry devoted to great kings. Later on the devotional literature composed in Braj about the love adventures of Lord Krishna has been considered the linguistic and literary basis for the development of Hindi, Bengali and Maithili literatures. Three more literary dialects are conventionally associated with pre-modern Hindi — (a) Avadhi, the language of sufi and bhakti poems, and especially Tulsidas’ Ramayana version; (b) saadhuukaarii or the so called saadhuu bhaaShaa of the nirguuNa bhakti poets and (c) Maithili, the language of devotional literature in northern Bihar. Additional impetus for its development was the commissioning of prose texts in khaRiibolii with the establishment of Fort William College in 1800.

 اُردُو‎ 

Urdu is an Ind0-Aryan language, spoken as a first or second language by 175 million people in Pakistan and by 50 million native speakers in India. Urdu is written in a modified form of the Persian script called nastaliq, and is rich in loanwords from Persian, Turkic and Arabic. Urdu develops from the so-called zabaan-e-dehlavii or khraRiibolii spoken in the Delhi area with influences by other regional dialects spoken around the area, such as Kauravii, Braaj, MevaTii, Eastern Panjabi, etc., which is spread throughout India as a lingua franca by traveling Hindu traders, sufi and bhakti mystics, the army, and migrants from Delhi to Aurangabad in the Deccan. Literary Urdu emerges first in the courts of the Islamic Rulers in Golconda, Bijapur and Aurangabad in Dekkan, later on in Agra, Lukhnow and Delhi in the North. The language of the Red Fort, called urduu-e-mu’allaa  is mentioned for the first time by the poet Mushafii, c. 1776. Initially, it is mixed with Persian and is also called rekhtaa, i.e. ‘scattered’. Gradually, less Persian was used compared to the poetry of Lucknow or Agra, under the influence of the poet Valii Dakhanii who moved from Aurangabad to Delhi and eventually Urdu emerges as a literary language with standardized grammar core, whose zenith is during the Delhi School of poetry 1740-80.

For more see The Indo-Aryan Languages by George Cardona and Danesh Jain (Editors), Routledge Language Family Series