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Urdu

Urdu
اُردُو (Urdū)
Urdu written in the Nastaliq calligraphic hand
Pronunciation[ʊɾduː] ⓘ
Native toSouth Asia[1][2]
Region
[citation needed]
SpeakersL1: 78 million (2011–2023)[6]
L2: 168 million (2011–2020)[7]
246 million (2011–2023)[8]
Early forms
Dialects
Indian Signing System
Official status
Official language in
Recognised minority
language in
South Africa (protected language)[13]
Regulated by
Language codes
ISO 639-1ur
ISO 639-2urd
ISO 639-3urd
Glottologurdu1245
Linguasphere59-AAF-q
Map of the regions of India and Pakistan showing:
  Areas where Urdu is either official or co-official
  Areas where Urdu is neither official nor co-official
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This article contains Urdu text. Without proper rendering support, you may see unjoined letters running left to right or other symbols instead of Urdu script.
Part of a series on the
Hindustani language
(or the Hindi-Urdu continuum)
History
Grammar
Linguistic history
Accessibility

Urdu (/ˈʊərduː/; اُردُو, pronounced [ʊɾduː] ⓘ, ALA-LC: Urdū) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule language, the status and cultural heritage of which are recognised by the Constitution of India.[14][15] It also has an official status in several Indian states.[note 1][16]

Urdu and Hindi share a common, predominantly Sanskrit- and Prakrit-derived, vocabulary base, phonology, syntax, and grammar, making them mutually intelligible during colloquial communication.[17][18][19][20] The common base of the two languages is sometimes referred to as the Hindustani language, or Hindi-Urdu, and Urdu has been described as a Persianised standard register of the Hindustani language.[21][22][23][24] While formal Urdu draws literary, political, and technical vocabulary from Persian,[25] formal Hindi draws these aspects from Sanskrit; consequently, the two languages' mutual intelligibility effectively decreases as the factor of formality increases.[26]

Urdu originated in what is today the Meerut division of Western Uttar Pradesh, a region adjoining Old Delhi and geographically in the upper Ganga-Jumna doab, or the interfluve between the Yamuna and Ganges rivers in India, where Khari Boli Hindi was spoken. Urdu shared a grammatical foundation with Khari Boli, but was written in a revised Perso-Arabic script and included vocabulary borrowed from Persian and Arabic, which retained its original grammatical structure in those languages.[27] In 1837, Urdu became an official language of the British East India Company, replacing Persian across northern India during Company rule; Persian had until this point served as the court language of various Indo-Islamic empires.[28][29][30] Religious, social, and political factors arose during the European colonial period in India that advocated a distinction between Urdu and Hindi, leading to the Hindi–Urdu controversy.[31]

According to 2022 estimates by Ethnologue and The World Factbook, produced by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Urdu is the 10th-most widely spoken language in the world, with 230 million total speakers, including those who speak it as a second language.[32][33]

  1. ^ Students' Britannica India. Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2000. p. 299. Hindustani developed as lingua franca in the medieval ages in and around Delhi, Meerut and Saharanpur because of the interaction between the speakers of Khariboli (a dialect developed in this region out of Shauraseni Prakrit) and the speakers of Persian, Turkish, and various dialects of Arabic who migrated to North India. Initially it was known by various names such as Rekhta (mixed), Urdu (language of the camp) and Hindvi or Hindustani (language of Hindustan). Though Khariboli supplied its basic vocabulary and grammar, it borrowed quite a lot of words from Persian and Arabic
  2. ^ Urdu at Ethnologue (28th ed., 2025) Closed access icon
  3. ^ "Data Tables". Census of India. 2011. Retrieved 25 March 2024.
  4. ^ "Languages - The World Factbook". Retrieved 25 March 2024.
  5. ^ "Population Monograph of Nepal Volume II (Social Demography)" (PDF).
  6. ^ Urdu at Ethnologue (28th ed., 2025) Closed access icon
  7. ^ Urdu at Ethnologue (28th ed., 2025) Closed access icon
  8. ^ Urdu at Ethnologue (28th ed., 2025) Closed access icon
  9. ^ "Urdu second official language in Andhra Pradesh". Deccan Chronicles. 24 March 2022. Retrieved 25 March 2022.
  10. ^ "Bill recognising Urdu as second official language passed". The Hindu. 23 March 2022. Retrieved 1 April 2022.
  11. ^ "Urdu is Telangana's second official language". The Indian Express. 16 November 2017. Retrieved 27 February 2018.
  12. ^ "Urdu is second official language in Telangana as state passes Bill". The News Minute. 17 November 2017. Retrieved 27 February 2018.
  13. ^ "Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 - Chapter 1: Founding Provisions". Retrieved 6 December 2014.
  14. ^ Gazzola, Michele; Wickström, Bengt-Arne (2016). The Economics of Language Policy. MIT Press. pp. 469–. ISBN 978-0-262-03470-8. Quote: "The Eighth Schedule recognizes India's national languages as including the major regional languages as well as others, such as Sanskrit and Urdu, which contribute to India's cultural heritage. ... The original list of fourteen languages in the Eighth Schedule at the time of the adoption of the Constitution in 1949 has now grown to twenty-two."
  15. ^ Groff, Cynthia (2017). The Ecology of Language in Multilingual India: Voices of Women and Educators in the Himalayan Foothills. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 58–. ISBN 978-1-137-51961-0. Quote: "As Mahapatra says: "It is generally believed that the significance for the Eighth Schedule lies in providing a list of languages from which Hindi is directed to draw the appropriate forms, style and expressions for its enrichment" ... Being recognized in the Constitution, however, has had significant relevance for a language's status and functions.
  16. ^ a b Muzaffar, Sharmin; Behera, Pitambar (2014). "Error analysis of the Urdu verb markers: a comparative study on Google and Bing machine translation platforms". Aligarh Journal of Linguistics. 4 (1–2): 1. Modern Standard Urdu, a register of the Hindustani language, is the national language, lingua-franca and is one of the two official languages along with English in Pakistan and is spoken in all over the world. It is also one of the 22 scheduled languages and officially recognized languages in the Constitution of India and has been conferred the status of the official language in many Indian states of Bihar, Telangana, Jammu, and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, and New Delhi. Urdu is one of the members of the new or modern Indo-Aryan language group within the Indo-European family of languages.
  17. ^ Gube, Jan; Gao, Fang (2019). Education, Ethnicity and Equity in the Multilingual Asian Context. Springer Publishing. ISBN 978-981-13-3125-1. The national language of India and Pakistan 'Standard Urdu' is mutually intelligible with 'Standard Hindi' because both languages share the same Indic base and are all but indistinguishable in phonology.
  18. ^ Cite error: The named reference Ahmad20022 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  19. ^ Yoon, Bogum; Pratt, Kristen L., eds. (15 January 2023). Primary Language Impact on Second Language and Literacy Learning. Lexington Books. p. 198. In terms of cross-linguistic relations, Urdu's combinations of Arabic-Persian orthography and Sanskrit linguistic roots provides interesting theoretical as well as practical comparisons demonstrated in table 12.1.
  20. ^ "Ties between Urdu & Sanskrit deeply rooted: Scholar". The Times of India. 12 March 2024. Retrieved 8 May 2024. The linguistic and cultural ties between Sanskrit and Urdu are deeply rooted and significant, said Ishtiaque Ahmed, registrar, Maula Azad National Urdu University during a two-day workshop titled "Introduction to Sanskrit for Urdu medium students". Ahmed said a substantial portion of Urdu's vocabulary and cultural capital, as well as its syntactic structure, is derived from Sanskrit.
  21. ^ Siddiqi, Mohammad Tahsin (1994). Hindustani-English code-mixing in modern literary texts. University of Wisconsin. Hindustani is the lingua franca of both India and Pakistan
  22. ^ Kiaer, Jieun (26 November 2020). Pragmatic Particles: Findings from Asian Languages. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 18. ISBN 978-1-350-11847-8. Urdu is a Persianized and standardized register of the Hindustani language. It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, and an official language of five states in India.
  23. ^ Gibson, Mary (13 May 2011). Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore. Ohio University Press. ISBN 978-0821443583. Bayly's description of Hindustani (roughly Hindi/Urdu) is helpful here; he uses the term Urdu to represent "the more refined and Persianised form of the common north Indian language Hindustani" (Empire and Information, 193); Bayly more or less follows the late eighteenth-century scholar Sirajuddin Ali Arzu, who proposed a typology of language that ran from "pure Sanskrit, through popular and regional variations of Hindustani to Urdu, which incorporated many loan words from Persian and Arabic. His emphasis on the unity of languages reflected the view of the Sanskrit grammarians and also affirmed the linguistic unity of the north Indian ecumene. What emerged was a kind of register of language types that were appropriate to different conditions. ...But the abiding impression is of linguistic plurality running through the whole society and an easier adaptation to circumstances in both spoken and written speech" (193). The more Persianized the language, the more likely it was to be written in Arabic script; the more Sanskritized the language; the more likely it was to be written in Devanagari.
  24. ^ Basu, Manisha (2017). The Rhetoric of Hindutva. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781107149878. Urdu, like Hindi, was a standardized register of the Hindustani language deriving from the Dehlavi dialect and emerged in the eighteenth century under the rule of the late Mughals.
  25. ^ Kiss, Tibor; Alexiadou, Artemis (10 March 2015). Syntax - Theory and Analysis. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. p. 1479. ISBN 978-3-11-036368-5.
  26. ^ Clyne, Michael (24 May 2012). Pluricentric Languages: Differing Norms in Different Nations. Walter de Gruyter. p. 385. ISBN 978-3-11-088814-0. With the consolidation of the different linguistic bases of Khari Boli there were three distinct varieties of Hindi-Urdu: the High Hindi with predominant Sanskrit vocabulary, the High-Urdu with predominant Perso-Arabic vocabulary and casual or colloquial Hindustani which was commonly spoken among both the Hindus and Muslims in the provinces of north India. The last phase of the emergence of Hindi and Urdu as pluricentric national varieties extends from the late 1920s till the partition of India in 1947.
  27. ^ Mody, Sujata S. (2018). The Making of Modern Hindi: Literary Authority in Colonian North India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. pp. 2–3. ISBN 978-0-19-948909-1. Urdu shared a grammatical base with Khari Boli Hindi, but was written in a modified form of the Perso-Arabic script and was inflected with Persian and Arabic vocabulary.
  28. ^ Metcalf, Barbara D. (2014). Islamic Revival in British India: Deoband, 1860-1900. Princeton University Press. pp. 207–. ISBN 978-1-4008-5610-7. The basis of that shift was the decision made by the government in 1837 to replace Persian as court language by the various vernaculars of the country. Urdu was identified as the regional vernacular in Bihar, Oudh, the North-Western Provinces, and Punjab, and hence was made the language of government across upper India.
  29. ^ Everaert, Christine (2009), Tracing the Boundaries between Hindi and Urdu: Lost and Added in Translation between 20th Century Short Stories, BRILL, pp. 253–, ISBN 978-90-04-18223-3, It was only in 1837 that Persian lost its position as official language of India to Urdu and to English in the higher levels of administration.
  30. ^ Lelyveld, David (1993). "Colonial Knowledge and the Fate of Hindustani". Comparative Studies in Society and History. 35 (4). Cambridge University Press: 665–682, 674. doi:10.1017/S0010417500018661. The earlier grammars and dictionaries made it possible for the British government to replace Persian with vernacular languages at the lower levels of judicial and revenue administration in 1837, that is, to standardize and index terminology for official use and provide for its translation to the language of the ultimate ruling authority, English. For such purposes Hindustani was equated with Urdu, as opposed to any geographically defined dialect of Hindi and was given official status through large parts of north India. Written in the Persian script with a largely Persian and, via Persian, an Arabic vocabulary, Urdu stood at the shortest distance from the previous situation and was easily attainable by the same personnel.
  31. ^ Ahmad, Rizwan (1 July 2008). "Scripting a new identity: The battle for Devanagari in nineteenth-century India". Journal of Pragmatics. 40 (7): 1163–1183. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2007.06.005. ISSN 0378-2166.
  32. ^ Chaman, Hussain (24 July 2022). Mahboob, Hussain (ed.). "Language Politics in Pakistan: Urdu as Official versus National Lingua Franca". Annals of Human and Social Sciences. 3 (2): 82–91. doi:10.35484/ahss.2022(3-II)08. ISSN 2790-6809.
  33. ^ "World", The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, 20 November 2023, retrieved 27 November 2023


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