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The spoken forms of Hindi, Urdu, Hindi-Urdu, and Hindustani are essentially identical, having served as the common language across much of South Asia for centuries, stretching from Baluchistan to Bengal and Karnataka to Kashmir. Today, however, many automatically view Urdu and Hindi as distinct languages primarily because they use different writing systems—Urdu employs Nastaliq, a modified Perso-Arabic script, while Hindi uses Devanagari, a script shared with other regional languages like Marathi and Nepali. The terms Hindustani, widely used during colonial times, and Hindi-Urdu, preferred in academic discussions since the 1980s, recognize the intertwined history of these languages, though neither term is commonly used in everyday South Asian conversation today.