An empirical reading of where the words come from when Hindi cinema sings of love, longing, and the moon — measured across two decades of chart-toppers.
Read this carefully: of the 2,372 content tokens we successfully classified — that is, after setting aside pronouns, postpositions, and the copula — fully 58% entered Hindi-Urdu through the Indo-Persian poetic tradition. The strictly Iranian-origin slice alone (dil, yaar, zindagi, dard) accounts for 38%. Sanskrit and unmistakably Indic words together form just 28% of the meaningful vocabulary.
Bollywood, in other words, sings overwhelmingly in the lexical register of the Mughal court — even when the melody is folk Punjabi, even when the singer is Arijit Singh, even when the genre is hip-hop.
Each rectangle below is sized by its share of the 2,935-token corpus. Hover for exact counts. Grammatical filler (pronouns, postpositions, auxiliary verbs) is overwhelmingly Indic and is shown separately.
Ranked by raw frequency across the 105-song corpus. Three definitions yield slightly different lists; we show the comprehensive ranking — Persian and Arabic-via-Persian combined — which is how lyricists experience the vocabulary in practice.
A few observations. Dil alone appears 277 times — roughly 2.6 times per song on average — making it the gravitational center of Bollywood lyric. Yaar and ishq follow at 139 and 131. The next tier (zindagi, rang, nazar, dard, dilbar) clusters at 25–60. Together these ten words alone supply 26.4% of all classified content tokens — a remarkable concentration.
The honest answer: it oscillates without a clear monotonic trend. Years dominated by qawwali revivals, romantic ballads, or Punjabi-Urdu hybrid genres push the share well above 70%; years rich in folk, Bhojpuri-flavored, or Sanskritic devotional tracks pull it below 40%. The mean across the period sits near 58%.
2023 (84%) — Pathaan-led year with Jhoome Jo Pathaan, Besharam Rang, Tere Vaaste. Heavy on Urdu-Punjabi crossover.
2017 (81%) — Anchored by Mere Rashke Qamar, a Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan qawwali rebuild dense with classical Persian-Arabic poetic vocabulary.
2008 (74%) — Khuda Jaane, Tujh Mein Rab, Haule Haule — a year of romantic devotion sung in the Persianate register.
2009 (31%) — Iktara, Twist, Jai Ho — folk-Sanskrit roots dominated.
2012 (32%) — Radha, Chikni Chameli, Tum Hi Ho Bandhu lean Sanskritic.
2007 (34%) — Jab We Met's folk-Punjabi vocabulary (mauja, naacho, saajna) anchors the year.
You asked us to report all three definitions separately. Here they are — each a defensible position taken by different schools of South Asian linguistics.
The strict-Persian count (38%) captures words like dil, yaar, zindagi, dard, nazar, dilbar — Iranian roots that came overland through Persian.
Add the Arabic-via-Persian layer (ishq, mohabbat, husn, manzil, kismat, rehmat, ibadat, adaalat, amaanat) and you get to 58%. These words are technically Arabic in root but reached Hindi-Urdu strictly through Persian poetic and administrative tradition. To a Bollywood lyricist they are functionally indistinguishable.
Arabic-direct: 0%. Pure Quranic-Arabic vocabulary that bypassed Persian (technical religious terms) is essentially absent from Bollywood love songs. The Persianate filter is total.
Turkic: 0%. Despite the Mughal connection, Turkic-origin words barely register in modern Bollywood lyrical vocabulary.
Sanskrit: 3.4%. Pure tatsama Sanskrit vocabulary is scarce — even devotional or patriotic songs lean on the Persianate emotional register.