I now pronounce you...

Arabic words in your pocket, Portuguese in your bathroom, sharp tools from Mongolia, and a kurī who isn’t from Punjab. When it comes to understanding the origins of Indian words, we are still discovering what we’ve borrowed, what we lent. Take a look at l

Some magic hides in plain sight. Take the languages we speak. Each word represents not only itself — intricate, complicate, duplicate, communicate — but also the story of how that word came to be. With English, the story is intricate enough. The 1.7 lakh words in the dictionary come largely from Greek and Latin, with new words being added from as far away as Korea, Zimbabwe and Tahiti.

With Indian languages, the trails are shorter but delightfully tangled. “There has been so much exchange in the last 1,000 years that every language here has a shared history,” says Abhishek Avtans, lecturer of Indic languages and linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

“Hindi and Urdu words derive not only from Sanskrit but Pali, Prakrit, Tamil, Kannada, Portuguese, English, Persian and Arabic too.”

There are Frankish words from a West Germanic language that is at least a thousand years old.

“It is from ‘Frankish’, in fact, that we get the word ‘Firangi’ for foreigner,” Avtans says. “Many other words come from ancient Dravidian languages that have evolved into modern south Indian lects or tongues. It makes etymology of Indian words much more complex.”

But it also gives the Indian tongue a unique flavour. “We have echo-formations… gaadi-vaadi, tana-bana, theek-thaak. We often re-duplicate for emphasis: Bade bade deshon mein aisi chhoti chhoti baatein, hoti rehti hai (Such little-little things keep happening in big-big countries),” Avtans says, quoting from the film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995).

Avtans’s linguistics research has taken him to the foothills of Meghalaya, where Jaiñtias speak an Austroasiatic language called Pnar, and to the Andamans, where language has literally saved lives.

The Great Andamanese have a folktale that has been passed down through generations. Essentially, its message is: When the ocean recedes from land, run to the hills. “It’s what made the community take shelter ahead of the 2004 tsunami,” he says. “All of them survived.”

And so ancient wisdom, hard-won, is preserved and passed on.

Ancient trade routes rear their heads, in linguistic milestones. Practices long dead become footnotes in how we name or describe an object.

See why ganjī is ganjī, and not remotely an Indian-origin word for vest. Find out why our words for sugar are both “Egyptian” (“misrī”) and “Chinese” (“chīnī”). See how a Dravidian Jack gave the jackfruit its name, and meet its fruity seafaring cousin.

Social media has brought languages closer, says Avtans.

On Twitter (@avtansa), he regularly fields requests from Indians who want to know more about the words we take for granted. He upset Punjabis by telling them that kur.ī, the local term for girl, is of Dravidian origin. Language enthusiasts have been translating Urdu couplets and Dakkani idioms and posting videos on pronunciation.

“A language is more in the mouth than in the books,” Avtans says. Over the years, his list of everyday words with surprising histories has only got longer.

Across the rest of this spread, take a look at Avtans’s list of some of the most interesting journeys words have taken to arrive on Indian tongues, and to travel from our lexicons to languages around the world.

Rachel Lopez