The example I’m thinking of is Urdu and Hindi. They’re different languages but have so much in common that in conversation there’s rarely a need to translate, but I can’t read or write a single word of the other language. So how did we end up speaking the same and writing different?
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The written form of a language can change (quite independently of the language changing), and this actually happens quite often.
For example,
* Vietnamese is written in the latin script, because the script was changed during the French occupation. It originally used a set of characters related to Chinese characters.
* Chinese itself has changed its script from “traditional” to “simplified” characters, except in Taiwan.
* Malay was once written in “Jawi”, a script similar to Arabic. Now it uses the latin alphabet. Turkish, similarly, once used a script similar to Arabic, and now uses the latin script.
* Hindi and Urdu are merely the official forms of a language linguists call Hindustani, or Hindi-Urdu. The language was originally written using a script similar to that now used for Hindi, the Urdu script is a modified form of the Persian script, which in turn is a modified form of the Arabic script.
There are other examples, too.
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