Words from Hindustani
5 words in Curio passed through Hindustani on their way into English.
About Hindustani
Indo-Aryan language of the Western Hindi group · spoken today
Where
India's Hindi Belt and Pakistan, plus the Deccani-speaking community in South India
When
Speakers
490.1M
as of 2006
Speakers, Wikidata figure for 2006
Family path
- Hindustani
- English
Where it came from
Its first written poetry, in Old Hindi, is traced to the Delhi Sultanate era of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In that period the Prakrit base of Old Hindi took in loanwords from Persian, Arabic and Turkic and developed into the present form of Hindustani. Its core vocabulary comes from Prakrit and Sanskrit (via Prakrit), with many loanwords from Persian and Arabic.
Source: Wikipedia
Family
Hindustani grew out of Prakrit.
Languages that grew out of Hindustani: Hindi.
The words, A to Z
- avatar
Before it meant a little icon standing in for you online, it meant a god stepping down to earth.
- coolie
A word for hired labor that traveled from Turkic servitude through several Asian languages before landing, uneasily, in English.
- gymkhana
A word for sporting games that got its athletic sheen from a false friend.
- jungle
A word for tangled wilderness that started out meaning the exact opposite — bare, dry land.
- khaki
A word for dust-colored cloth that once marched across an empire.