Two languages that were never related, and share a thousand words anyway.
Bhashalu, meaning languages, is a project about what happens when two unrelated tongues live side by side for a thousand years. Hindi is Indo-Aryan. Telugu is Dravidian. They are not siblings, not cousins, not one language in two scripts. And yet they have been quietly trading words the whole time, through Sanskrit, through the Persian courts of the Deccan, and now through English. Bhashalu is about that traffic: which words crossed, which way they went, and which ones only look related.
The app
Every entry is a pair, not a translation
A dictionary built the honest way. Each entry holds a Hindi side and a Telugu side, each with its own script, romanization, origin and grammatical gender, plus a plain statement of how the two relate. Cousins through a shared Sanskrit parent, the same Persian loan taken twice, or simply two unrelated words that mean the same thing. Instant, offline, and it says so when scholars disagree.
Telugu gender, modeled properly
Telugu does not have Hindi’s masculine and feminine. It distinguishes masculine from non-masculine in the singular, and human from non-human in the plural, so she patterns with it in one and with he in the other. Most resources flatten that into Hindi’s two-way split. Bhashalu shows you the real thing, because it is one of the genuinely surprising parts of learning Telugu.
Ask Bhashalu anything
Beyond the curated set, type any Hindi or Telugu word and the app looks it up with the same full treatment, then keeps your lookups on the device so an answer you liked is still there next week. The bundled dictionary works with the phone in airplane mode; the lookup is a fallback for what is not in it yet, never a dependency for what is.
What is that song actually saying?
Type a Hindi or Telugu song and get its language story: the words worth keeping, each with its Hindi and Telugu sides and how the two relate, the poetry behind the lines, and one-tap links to find the song on Spotify or YouTube. Original commentary, never reproduced lyrics.
A patient tutor, in the script you choose
Practice in a chat with an AI tutor that corrects every sentence and explains why. Replies come in Latin letters, Devanagari, or Telugu script, whichever you are learning to read. It sits behind an explicit consent screen, and only the sentences you type are ever sent.
Two scripts, one chart
The alphabets are cousins even though the languages are not: Devanagari and Telugu script both descend from Brahmi, which is why their charts line up row for row. The app puts the two side by side, letter against letter, marks the rows where they stop corresponding, and includes a practice mode for learning to read either one.
A word every day, and the essays behind the words
A word of the day drawn from the pair set, with an optional morning notification. And for the bigger picture, a set of essays on how two unrelated languages came to share a thousand words. The same essays are published here in full.
A reading guide that marks what the spelling hides
Everyday romanization cannot show everything. Telugu పాత (old) and పాట (song) are different words that both come out paata. So every Telugu entry carries a second reading, derived mechanically from the script itself. Long vowels double (aa, ee, oo), and a capital marks the two things doubling cannot: retroflexion, so the song is paaTa, and the long e and o, so “I” is nEnu.
Hear it said, and read aloud
Every entry carries pronunciation buttons for both sides, spoken by your phone's best installed Hindi and Telugu voices. The essays read themselves aloud too, in a studio-quality neural voice, with a player that can pause, scrub, and speed up to 1.5×, in the app and on this site.
Yours, in your language
The whole interface runs in English, हिन्दी, or తెలుగు. Quiz rounds on meanings, origins, and what the two languages genuinely share, script practice with streaks and milestones, and dark mode throughout.
No account, no ads, no tracking
The dictionary is bundled in the app and works entirely offline. There is nothing to sign up for, nothing collected, and nothing sent anywhere. It is built for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Mac.
What an entry looks like
Same meaning, entirely different words, from entirely different sources. Hindi reached for Arabic, Telugu for Sanskrit. This is the ordinary case between these two languages, and saying so plainly is more useful than hunting for a connection that is not there.
Both languages took the same word, and Telugu gave it the ordinary -u ending its own native nouns carry. The Deccan is the doorway this one came through, through centuries of Persian-speaking courts at Golconda and Hyderabad.
Native Dravidian stock on one side, Indo-Aryan on the other, with no connection at all. Most of everyday Telugu looks like this, and it is the clearest evidence that these are two unrelated languages rather than two dialects.
How words actually crossed
- Sanskrit, from above. Telugu borrowed enormously from Sanskrit, and its grammar names the layers precisely: tatsama (borrowed unchanged), tadbhava (borrowed and reshaped), and desya (native Dravidian stock). Hindi took from the same source. So when a Hindi word and a Telugu word match, they are usually cousins through a shared parent, not borrowings from each other.
- Persian and Arabic, from the Deccan. The Qutb Shahi and Asaf Jahi courts made Hyderabad a Persian and Deccani center for centuries. That layer sits deep in Telugu, especially in Telangana.
- English, in the last two centuries. Both languages borrowed heavily, often the same word for the same new thing. It is the one layer where a Hindi speaker and a Telugu speaker can be sure they are saying the same word, and the one nobody finds surprising.
How a loan stops looking foreign. Perso-Arabic borrowings into Telugu usually pick up a final -u: Persian roz becomes రోజు roju, Arabic jawab becomes జవాబు javaabu. Note which way that rule runs. The -u is Telugu’s ordinary noun ending, worn by native words like నీరు neeru and ఊరు ooru too, so it does not betray a loan. It naturalizes one.
From the articles
Two unrelated languages, a thousand shared words
Hindi is Indo-Aryan. Telugu is Dravidian. No family tree connects them, yet a Hindi speaker starting Telugu keeps meeting familiar words. Both facts are true, and this whole project lives in the gap between them.
The Deccan doorway
Golconda and Hyderabad ran on Persian for centuries, and Telugu quietly pocketed the vocabulary. How kharchu, javaabu, and kaburu got in, and how a single vowel made them look native.
Why Telugu sounds so Sanskrit
Telugu did not descend from Sanskrit, but its formal register is saturated with it. On tatsama, tadbhava, the -am ending that gives the borrowings away, and why a borrowed wardrobe does not change the skeleton.
Same grandparent, different scripts
Devanagari and Telugu script are both grandchildren of Brahmi, which is why the alphabet charts rhyme row by row while the languages stay strangers. Also: what పాత and పాట know that paata cannot say.
False friends and true cousins
Hindi phool and Telugu puvvu both mean flower and look like an obvious match. They are unrelated, and the proof runs through Kannada. A field guide to telling inheritance from borrowing from coincidence.
All articles →Get the app
Bhashalu is built for iPhone, iPad, Android, and Mac.
iPhone, iPad, and Mac install from the App Store. The Android build is a direct download while the Play Store listing is in the works, so Android will ask you to allow installs from your browser the first time.
SHA-256 of the file above:80d82518adb05f5de1ad5e5d6a13919a809991d7cc867643aa5b6a7d1e583185
Verify the download with shasum -a 256 Bhashalu.apk and check it matches the hash
printed here.
On accuracy
A wrong etymology is far worse than an honest "scholars disagree". Where a word’s origin is genuinely unsettled, Bhashalu says so rather than inventing a tidy story, and popular folk etymologies are debunked rather than repeated.
The harder discipline is refusing a pattern that is not there. Hindi kutta and Telugu kukka both mean dog and sound like they should be related. They may be, through a shared Sanskrit source, or they may not be. Nobody has settled it, so the entry says that instead of picking whichever story reads better.
About the author
Nipun Dubey builds things at the intersection of technology and language. By day he is the CEO & Co-Founder of HappiNest.AI, an AI leasing copilot that helps property managers significantly reduce costs and improve operations for all things leasing. Before HappiNest he led AI and B2B startups bringing transformational change to legacy industries, worked at leading technology companies, and is a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Bhashalu comes out of the other thread, and the older one: a lifelong fascination with languages and linguistics, history, and cultural anthropology, and a conviction that showing people how much they already share is the fastest way to connect them. It runs in the family. His grandparents grew up in pre-Partition colonial India, and one grandfather, a renowned professor of Hindi and Indian languages, spent his life teaching the very words this project now traces.
Bhashalu is the companion to Zubane, which covers Hindi and Urdu. Where Zubane argues that two things people think are separate are really one language, Bhashalu argues the opposite and more interesting case: that two genuinely separate languages can still hand each other a thousand words.
Get in touch
hello@bhashalu.com. Corrections and counterexamples especially welcome, and Telugu speakers doubly so.
