How do the vocabularies of literary Hindi and literary Urdu differ?

The vocabularies of literary Hindi and literary Urdu differ primarily due to their distinct historical and cultural influences, despite sharing the same Indo-Aryan grammatical base and phonology.12

During the 19th-century efforts to standardize a literary form of Hindustani, the two languages were polarized through their choice of loanwords. Literary Urdu, or "High Urdu," draws heavily from Arabic and Persian for its learned vocabulary, reflecting the influence of Muslim court culture and the Perso-Arabic literary tradition. It also employs more Perso-Arabic prefixes and suffixes, such as dar- (in) or -saz (maker), and occasionally uses Perso-Arabic pluralization patterns like -aat.2314

In contrast, literary Hindi, or "High Hindi," tends to replace Perso-Arabic vocabulary with terms derived from Sanskrit. This "Sanskritization" process was driven by efforts to distinguish the language from Urdu and align it with indigenous Indo-Aryan roots. While both languages share a large common core of basic vocabulary—including pronouns, numerals, and verbs—their literary registers are marked by these divergent sources of formal and technical terminology.132