My understanding is the main difference between Hindi and Urdu is that Hindi is in Devanagari script and Urdu is in a modified form of Arabic Script, and they can understand each others spoken language with ease, whereas Moroccans and Iraqis cannot understand each other at all. Why is this?
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The distinction between “language” and “dialect” is often more cultural than scientific. The famous quote (from Yiddish, which was itself often minimized as a language) was “a language is a dialect with an army and navy.”
In this case, there’s a lot of social and cultural pressure to consider Arabic one language. It is the language of an ethnic group and a religion. While people vary a lot culturally from Morocco to Iraq, they typically share a faith and some cultural identity, with pride in reading the Quran in the same language. Besides, everyone can understand Egyptian movies.
Hindi and Urdu, on the other hand, have undergone significant cultural pressures to diverge and be considered differently, particularly in the 20th century as a result of the effects of British rule and partition. People who speak Hindi and Urdu are fairly likely to have cultural differences/conflict, particularly on opposite sides of the Pakistan/India border.
A striking example of this same dynamic happened in the Balkans, where 50 years ago everyone would have agreed that the language was Serbo-Croatian and everyone spoke it with minor regional variations. After a decade of brutal ethnic and religious conflict and Yugoslavia breaking up into component nations, people are more likely to speak of Bosnian, Montenegrin, Serbian, or Croatian; linguists would still consider them varieties of one language. Whether Mandarin/Cantonese/others are truly dialects of Chinese or separate languages is another interesting and politicized question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_secessionism
EDIT: A particularly weird situation arose after the Soviet Union annexed the region of Moldavia (then part of Romania) during WWII, what’s now Moldova. The local language had been variously referred to as Romanian or Moldovan for centuries and a Romanian speaker from Bucharest would have zero issues with understanding it, though it was written in the Cyrillic alphabet until the 19th century. The Soviet authorities, wanting to enforce separation, insisted on calling it Moldovan and writing it in Cyrillic only. Since the fall of communism, it’s switched back to the Latin alphabet and is variably called Moldovan or Romanian.
The term ‘language’ does not have a well defined meaning. Often political or social factors play heavily in what we call one language. Two political regions want to have independent culture? Like Hindi and Urdu, or the scandinavian languages. Will call mutually intelligable dialects different languages. Regions or groups that want to be culturially tied, will lump different languages into one. Like the arabic languages being under one religion, or the chinese languages.
Hindi and Urdu are not in fact separate languages, but two prestige dialects of one language. The distinction developed in the late nineteenth century as a result of colonial religious politics. More specifically, they are two registers of a single dialect, Khari Boli, which is historically spoken in the Delhi region. There are other dialects, including ones with rich literary traditions, notably Dakhni and Braj, but for a variety of reasons rather than developing out of any of these, modern standard Hindi was deliberately crafted from Khari Boli by abandoning the Nastaliq script, Perso-Arabic vocabulary, and also suppressing Indic/tadbhava vocabulary in favor of neologisms derived from Sanskrit. Despite all this, more than a century later speakers of standard Hindi and standard Urdu can easily understand each other until they begin using formal/literary/technical vocabulary.
Politics. The boundaries between languages can be fuzzy and are often defined by political rather than linguistic factors. Treating Moroccan and Iraqi Arabic as merely different dialects of a common language ties in to political ideologies like Pan-Arabism and Arab nationalism, it encourages a sense of shared identity across the Arab world (or conversely the sense of shared identity encourages the view that Arabic is a single language), whereas the longstanding hostile relationship between India and Pakistan encourages the two to differentiate themselves from each other and treat Hindi and Urdu as distinct languages. The Balkanisation of, uh, the Balkans after the breakup of Yugoslavia led to a similar situation with Serbian, Croatian, Montenigrin, and Bosnian, which could be considered different registers of a common language but have historically been treated as being separate languages.
Urdu/Hindi are at times referred to as one language, Hindustani. While Urdu is a national language of Pakistan and the main lingua franca, only a rather small minority speak it as their mother tongue. India actually has a significantly larger population of native Urdu speakers. Correspondingly, the Hindi language movie industry, Bollywood, historically has intentionally written scripts to make movies accessible to both Urdu and Hindi speakers.
It’s all about politics. Scientific definition would define them as the same language. Just as American English is the same language as Indian English with different accents. In scientific definition, the Sinnitc (Han Chinese) language consists of multiple languages that are not mutually intelligible with each other. Cantonese speakers cannot understand Mandarin speakers, you would have to learn the language. They share similar words but even their language structure is different. Cantonese is as closely related to Mandarin as English is to French, they are in the same language family. Urdu and Hindi are related to English too, that’s why they call it the Indo-European language.
How we divide various groups of dialects into languages has often been heavily influenced by modern ideas of nationalism and the emergence of nation states. In the past, most languages (aside from some liturgical languages and a few other exceptions) weren’t standardized, and languages tended to have far more dialectal variations. People rarely communicated with other people outside of their local area, so there was little need to classify languages and dialects.
When nation states began to emerge, national leaders wanted to create a sense of unity among their people, so they turned to language as a unifying force. National identity became closely tied to one’s language, so politicians would often try to promote common standard languages while discouraging minority languages and non-standard dialects. Those trying to promote minority groups would encourage their group to rally around their language/dialect. Those who wanted to create a sense of unity between separate but related groups would downplay the differences between their languages/dialects (ex. Chinese varieties, Arabic, Serbo-Croatian, etc). Those trying to divide related groups would emphasize the differences between their languages/dialects (ex. Hindi and Urdu, Serbian and Croatian, etc). Sometimes, the divisions were arbitrary and dialect continuums were split up by political borders (ex. the Scandinavian languages, German and Dutch, etc).
In the examples listed above, the political situation of the 20th Century created divisions between Hindi and Urdu speakers while encouraging unity among Arabic speakers. Under British rule, Hindi and Urdu were typically regarded as one language and the terms were used interchangably (alongside Hindustani). However, when India and Pakistan were partitioned, decades of political hostility followed, and each country tried to differentiate itself from the other. India labelled the language as Hindi and placed an emphasis on its Sanskrit vocabulary, while Pakistan labelled it as Urdu and emphasized its Perso-Arabic vocabulary (though some Indians do identify as Urdu speakers and vice versa). The different scripts also reflect the religious division between the two countries. Conversely, the Arab World experienced a push toward unity and commonality in the mid-20th Century thanks to the growth of Arab nationalism and pan-Arabism. The various Arabic varieties had always been linked together with a common literary language (Classical Arabic), but the politics of the era and greater contact amongst foreign Arabic speakers encouraged many to see the various spoken varieties as one common Arabic language for the Arab peoples.
Ultimately, political factors tend to be the biggest motivator in how languages and dialects are separated when dividing lines are murky. Sometimes, the political situation encourages people to treat two forms of speech as dialects of a single language. Sometimes, politics encourages people to treat them as separate languages. Sometimes, two dialects of a language can be reclassified as separate languages with very little change to the dialects themselves, or sometimes the reverse may happen. In an ideal world, languages would be classified purely by their linguistic similarity, but it is often difficult to separate languages from the identities of their speakers.
Moroccans and Iraqis and the rest of Arabs can perfectly understand each other by putting a little bit of effort and using more neutral words. Arabic is huge in vocabulary that’s why each dialect uses different words, but they are all synonymous to esch other. For example, in Morocco we say ‘ana kan bghi’ to ‘i love something’, in Saudi they use the same word but different variation they say ‘ana abgha’. We say ‘hadi’ (this), other arabs say ‘haide/ hai’, similar words. Northern Morocco uses ‘aayel/ayla’, Saudis say ‘ayaal’ (kids). And there’s millions of other examples.
I’m pretty sure Moroccans and Iraqis can understand each other, they’d just need to adjust their natural dialect a bit and maybe slow it down a tad. It’s a stretch to say they can’t understand each other at all, at the very least they’d be able to have basic understanding of each other.
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