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How are Hindi and Urdu related?

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Hindi and Urdu are closely related languages that share the same Indo-Aryan base and are mutually intelligible. Both developed from the regional speech of northwestern India, historically known as Hindustani, which served as a lingua franca in the Indian subcontinent.12

While they are nearly identical in grammar and phonology, they are typically treated as independent languages due to their distinct lexicons and writing systems:1

Vocabulary: Hindi draws heavily from Sanskrit, whereas Urdu incorporates significant influence from Arabic and Persian.12
Writing Systems: Hindi is written in the Devanagari script, while Urdu uses a modified Perso-Arabic script known as Nastaliq.1

The distinction between the two became more pronounced during the 19th century as standardization efforts introduced more Sanskrit terms into Hindi and more Persian and Arabic terms into Urdu. Following the partition of India in 1947, they were established as separate official languages in India and Pakistan, respectively.2