It is time for something new new: Khattak dance. Regardez ça-là, it is mesmerizing. The Khattacks speak Pashto. Their historical centers include Herat, Ghowr, Ghazni, Zhob, Karak, Tirah and Wana. Their ruler under traditional organization was Malak.
We could easily learn Pashto as it is Indo-Iranian (English is Indo-European) and uses Arabic letters (an alphabet, not characters or a syllabary). Then we would speak with Khattaks, a people Herodotus knew and that appears as well in Genesis and Exodus.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
The movements, especially of the hands and the head, are very similar to a lot of indian dances.
By the way, at first I thought you misspelled Kathak! Here’s a sample.
The dance itself starts at around the 2:10 mark.
That’s lovely … what language are they speaking (or should I just know it must be Hindi since it’s a video for broad distribution) … I would like those outfits, I have always wanted such outfits, especially the orange and pink one.
She’s speaking in Urdu, he in Hindi. I like the gender bending that goes on in a lot of Indian classical dances, many of whom have religious influences.
Aha, 2 languages, that is why they sound so different. I know nothing about India really, only enough to figure out I’d be totally fascinated.
Spoken Urdu is almost completely understandable for a Hindi speaking person (and vice versa), but the scripts are totally different.
Which is why it’s Hindi-Urdu, I guess, but she sounds so different. (I have not figured out where the distinctions like, really, between Indic, Indo-Aryan, and Indo-European languages are, do you know anything about this?)
I find these “trees” to be very simplistic, but as you can see here:
The Indic (the same thing as Indo-Aryan) languages, via Sanskrit, are a branch of the Indo-European language family, rather than a separate family or grouping of languages.
Although I am far from an expert on this, so please take my comment with many grains of salt.
I love the chart and want to inhale it. Learn all of that. It doesn’t list Danish which leads me to wonder, is Danish part of Frisian or part of Swedish? And it doesn’t list Czech. Still I love the chart and want to eat it, learn them all … and Arabic.
She does sound different and it’s mostly because of the tone. Urdu, even in informal situations, is spoken very formally and delicately. To Hindi speaking people it really does sound like poetry. Which is so weird because they use most of the same words we do in conversation, but the way they say it, that style is so different.
I don’t know enough about the languages to answer your question.
And Urdu is famous for poetry. I wish I could read it and Arabic. Turkish. Persian. I should have been an Orientalist, it seems…
You may like this: http://www.criterion.com/films/1547-in-custody
The comment on this NYT review is quite interesting: http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/131166/In-Custody/overview
Haha! I clicked on some Indian site for it and suddenly Citibank threw up some box in which it wanted me to apply for an account in rupees!!!
Ha. The way he capitalizes ‘India’ in the end kind of gives it away. I suspect he’s not a big fan of the country. Oh well.
I believe art and artists cannot survive without patronage, in India, or anywhere else. I would counter his comment by saying that it is INDIAN CULTURE (note the caps!) that has produced all this great art in the form of music, language, dance, and so on. It’s the Indian economic situation that has made it difficult to sustain it. With limited resources one’s priorities shift.
The british did quite a number on us, too, regarding language and other things.
Yes. I’ll get the movie, though!