The Teaching of Hindi-Urdu in the United States: The State of the Art.

Many Western scholars consider Hindi and Urdu as a single linguistic entity. The author concedes that "in an important sense this is correct." Hindu and Muslim inhabitants of the same village behave like members of a single speech community. However, minor differences in the phonology, grammar, and lexicon are underscored by the differences in the writing systems, by which prose or poetry is identified. Hindi, which uses Devanagari script, is taught only at the college level in the United States. (Exceptions are the Peace Corps programs, no t included within the scope of this paper, and the Neglected Languages Program conducted by Boyd-Bowman from S.U.N.Y. at Buffalo.) Because Hindi has no history of traditional teaching practices, universities offering courses in Hindi utilize oral-aural approaches and emphasize competence in speaking. However, beyond elementary level, available materials are very scarce, and not well suited to students of social sciences. These situations apply also to Urdu, which uses Perso-Arabic script, and for which there is even less widely available regular instruction. Also discussed in this paper are needs of students in both of these language areas, overseas centers, summer and undergraduate programs, the writing systems, recommended teaching materials, research priorities, and the role of these two languages in South Asia. (AMM)