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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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.
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