Urdu (اردو) is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan family that developed under Persian, Turkish, and Arabic influence in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1200-1800).

Taken by itself, Urdu is approximately the twentieth most populous natively spoken language in the world, and is the national language of Pakistan as well as one of the 24 national languages of India. However, Urdu is often considered to be part of a wider Hindustani language, in which case it is the fourth most populous language in the world.

Speakers and geographic distribution

There are between 60 and 80 million native Urdu speakers.

In Pakistan, Urdu is spoken and understood by a majority of urban dwellers in such cities as Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Quetta, Hyderabad, Sialkot, Gujranwala, Faisalabad, Multan and Sukkur. Urdu is used as the official language in all provinces of Pakistan. It is also taught as a compulsory language up to high school in both the English and Urdu medium school systems. This has produced millions of Urdu speakers whose mother tongue is one of the regional languages of Pakistan such as Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Kashmiri, Balochi, Seraiki, and Brahui. Urdu is the lingua franca of Pakistan and is absorbing many words from regional languages of Pakistan. The regional languages are also being influenced by Urdu vocabulary. Most of the nearly five million Afghan refugees of different ethnic origins (such as Pakhtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara, and Turkmen) who stayed in Pakistan for over twenty-five years have also became fluent in Urdu. It is fair to conclude that the center of Urdu language has shifted from Delhi and Lucknow in India to Karachi and Lahore in Pakistan.

In India, Urdu is spoken in Uttar Pradesh, Kashmir, Delhi, Bhopal, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mumbai and other central parts of India. Some Indian schools teach Urdu as a first language and have their own syllabus and exams; Indian madrasas also teach Arabic as well as Urdu. Newspapers such as Daily Salar, Paasban are published and distributed in Bangalore and other cities.

Urdu is also spoken in urban Afghanistan. Outside South Asia, it is spoken by large numbers of workers in the major urban centres of the Persian Gulf countries and Saudi Arabia. Urdu is also spoken by large numbers of immigrants and their children in the major urban centers of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Norway and Australia.

Countries with large numbers of Urdu speakers:

Official Status

Urdu is the national language of Pakistan. It shares official language status with English. Although English is used in most elite circles, and Punjabi has a plurality of native speakers, Urdu is the lingua franca and is expected to prevail. Urdu is also one of the official languages of India, and in Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir and the state of Andhra Pradesh, Urdu has official language status. While the government school system in most other states emphasizes Standard Hindi, at universities in cities such as Lucknow and Hyderabad, Urdu is spoken and learned and is regarded as a language of prestige.

Classification and related languages

Urdu is a member of the Indo-Aryan family of languages, which is in turn a branch of the Indo-European family. It is part of a dialect continuum which extends across northern South Asia from Panjabi to Bengali. These idioms all have similar grammatical structures and share a large portion of their vocabulary. Punjabi, for instance, is very similar to Urdu: Punjabi written in the Shahmukhi script can be understood by speakers of Urdu with a little difficulty, but spoken Punjabi has a very different phonology (pronunciation system) and cannot be easily understood by Urdu speakers. However, the language mostly closely linked to Urdu is Standard Hindi. (See below.)

Dialects

Urdu has four recognized dialects: Dakhini, Pinjari, Rekhta, and Modern Vernacular Urdu.

Modern Vernacular Urdu is the form of the language that is most widespread and is spoken around Delhi, Lucknow, Karachi and Lahore.

Dakhini (also known as Dakani, Deccani, Desia, Mirgan) is spoken in Maharashtra state in India and around Hyderabad. It has fewer Persian and Arabic words than standard Urdu.

In addition, Rekhta (or Rekhti), the language of Urdu poetry, is sometimes counted as a separate dialect.

Grammar

Urdu nouns are either masculine or feminine. However, there is disagreement over the gender of some nouns, particularly words newly introduced from English, which does not use gender.

In Urdu there are also singular and plural noun forms.

Levels of formality in Urdu

Urdu in its less formalized register has been referred to as a raikhtha (ریختہ, "rough mixture"). The more formal register of Urdu is sometimes

The etymology of the word used in the Urdu language for the most part decides how polite or refined your speech is. Urdu speakers would distinguish between paani and aab for example, or between kunwara and mard.

If a word is of Persian or Arabic origin, the level of speech is considered to be more formal and grand. Similarly, if Persian or Arabic grammar constructs, such as the Izafat, are used in Urdu, the level of speech is also considered more formal and grand. An example of this would be the difference between Jinhe naaz hai Hind par, woh kahaan hai and sanaqaan-e-tasdeeq-e-mashriq kahaan hai.

Politeness

A host of words are used to show respect and politeness. This emphasis on politeness, which is reflected in the vocabulary, is known as Takaluf in Urdu. These words are generally used when adressing elders, or people with whom one is not acquainted. For example, the English pronoun 'you' can be translated into three words in Urdu: the singular forms 'tu' (informal, extremely intimate, or derogatory) and 'tum' (informal and showing intimacy called "apna pun" in Urdu) and the plural form 'aap' (formal and respectful). Similarly, verbs, for example, "come," can be translated three ways: "ayye" or "aaen" (nazalized n)( formal and respectful), "ao" (informal and intimate with less degree) and "aa" (extremely informal, intimate and often derogatory).

Vocabulary

Urdu has a vocabulary rich in words with Indian and Middle Eastern origins. The borrowings are dominated by words from Persian and Arabic. There are also a number of borrowings from Sanskrit, Turkish, Portuguese and more recently English. Many of the words of Arabic origin have different nuances of meaning and usage than they do in Arabic. In fact, Urdu is the classical example of the Muslim empire's curiosity.

Writing System

Urdu is written in a derivative of the Persian alphabet, which is itself derivative of the Arabic alphabet. Like Semitic Languages, Urdu script is written from right to left. Urdu is similar in appearance and letters to Arabic, Sindhi, Persian, and Pashto. In their modern incarnation, Urdu differs in appearance from Arabic in that it typically uses the more complex and sinuous Nasta’liq style of script, whereas Arabic is more commonly written in the modernized Naskh style. Nasta’liq is notoriously difficult to typeset, so Urdu newspapers were made from hand-written masters (a.k.a katib or khush-navees) until the late 1980s. The daily Jang was the first Urdu newspaper composed in Nasta’liq on computer. There are efforts underway to develop more sophisticated and user-friendly Urdu support on computers and the Internet. Nowadays, nearly all Urdu newspapers, magazines, journals, and periodicals are composed on computers via various Urdu software programs.

Usually, bare transliterations of Urdu into Roman letters omit many phonemic elements that have no equivalent in English or other languages commonly written in the Latin alphabet. It should be noted that a reasonably comprehensive system has emerged with specific notations to signify non-English sounds, but it can only be properly read by someone already familiar with Urdu, Persian, or Arabic for letters such as:ژ خ غ ط ص or ق and Hindi for letters such as ڑ. This script may be found on the Internet, and it allows people who understand the language but without knowledge of their written forms to communicate with each other.

A list of the Urdu alphabet and pronunciation is given below. Urdu contains many historical spellings from Arabic and Persian, and therefore has many irregularities. The Arabic letters yaa and haa are split into two in Urdu: one of the yaa variants is used at the ends of words for a long ē sound, and one of the haa variants is used to indicate the aspirated consonants. The retroflex consonants needed to be added as well; this was accomplished by placing a superscript ط (toay) above the corresponding dental consonants. Several letters which represent distinct consonants in Arabic are conflated in Persian, and this has carried over to Urdu.

Urdu is occasionally also written in the Roman script. Roman Urdu has been used since the days of the British Raj, partly as a result of the availability and low cost of Roman movable type for printing presses. The use of Roman Urdu was common in contexts such as product labels. Today it is regaining popularity among users of text-messaging and Internet services and is developing its own style and conventions. Habib R. Sulemani says, "The younger generation of Urdu-speaking people around the world are using on the Internet and it has become essential for them, because they use the Internet and English is its language. A person from Islamabad chats with another in Delhi on the Internet only in Roman Urdu. They both speak (almost) the same language but with different scripts . Moreover, the younger generation of those who are from the English medium schools or settled in the west, can speak Urdu but can’t write it in the traditional Arabic script and thus Roman Urdu is a blessing for such a population."

Examples

Literature

Urdu has only become a literary language in recent centuries, as Persian and Arabic were formerly the idioms of choice for "elevated" subjects. However, despite its late development, Urdu literature boasts some world-recognized artists and a considerable corpus.

Prose

Religious

After Arabic and Persian, Urdu holds the largest collection of work on Islamic literature and sharia. These include translations and interpretation of Qur'an, commentary on Hadith, Fiqh, history, spirituality, Sufism and metaphysics. A great number of classical texts from Arabic and Persian, have also been translated into Urdu. Relatively inexpensive publishing, combined with the use of Urdu as a lingua franca among Muslims of South Asia, has meant that Islam-related works in Urdu far outnumber such works in any other South Asian language. One of the most popular Islamic books was originally written in Urdu, the Faizal-e-Amal.

Literary

Secular prose includes all categories of widely known fiction and non-fiction work, separable into genres.

The daastaan, or tale, a traditional story which may have many characters and complex plotting. This has now fallen into disuse.

The afsaana, or short story, probably the best-known genre of Urdu fiction. The best-known afsaana writers, or afsaana nigaar, in Urdu are Saadat Hasan Manto, Qurat-ul-Ain Haider, Munshi Premchand, Krishan Chander, Ghulam Abbas, Banu Qudsia and Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi. Premchand, a Hindi writer, became known as a pioneer in the afsaana, though some contend that his were not technically the first as Sir Ross Masood had already written many short stories in Urdu.

Novels form a genre of their own, in the tradition of the English novel.

Other genres include saférnama, sarguzisht, inshaeya, murasela, and khud navvisht.

Poetry

Main article: Urdu poetry

Urdu has been the premiere language of poetry in South Asia for two centuries, and has developed a rich tradition in a variety of poetic genres. The 'Ghazal' in Urdu represents the most popular form of subjective poetry, while the 'Nazm' exemplifies the objective kind, often reserved for narrative, descriptive, didactic or satirical purposes. Under the broad head of the Nazm we may also include the classical forms of poems known by specific names such as 'Masnavi' (a long narrative poem in rhyming couplets on any theme: romantic, religious, or didactic), 'Marsia' (an elegy traditionally meant to commemorate the martyrdom of Hazrat Imam Hussain, grandson of Prophet Muhammad, and his comrades of the Karbala fame), or 'Qasida' (a panegyric written in praise of a king or a nobleman), for all these poems have a single presiding subject, logically developed and concluded. However, these poetic species have an old world aura about their subject and style, and are different from the modern Nazm, supposed to have come into vogue in the later part of the nineteenth century.

• Ghazal (غزل), as practiced by many poets in the Arab tradition. Mir, Ghalib, Dagh and Faiz are well-known composers of ghazal.
• Nazm
• Qat'ã
• Rubai (a.k.a. Rubayyat or Rubaiyat)
• Masnavi
• Musaddas
• Qaseeda (a.k.a. Qasida)
• Geet
• Sehra
• Marsia
• Shehr aashob
• Doha, Urdu

Foreign forms such as the sonnet, azad nazm and haiku have also been used by some modern Urdu poets.

Probably the most widely recited, and memorized genre of contemporary Urdu poetry is naat—panegyric poetry written in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. Naat can be of any formal category, but is most commonly in the ghazal form. The language used in Urdu naat ranges from the intensely colloquial to a highly Persianized formal language. The great early twentieth century scholar Imam Ahmad Raza Khan, who wrote many of the most well known naats in Urdu, epitomized this range in a ghazal of nine stanzas (bayt) in which every stanza contains half a line each of Arabic, Persian, formal Urdu, and colloquial Hindi. The same poet composed a salaam—a poem of greeting to the Prophet Muhammad, derived from the unorthodox practice of qiyam, or standing, during the mawlid, or celebration of the birth of the Prophet—Mustafa Jan-e Rahmat, which, due to being recited on Fridays in some Urdu speaking mosques throughout the world, is probably the more frequently recited Urdu poems of the modern era.

Another important genre of urdu prose are the poems commemorating the martyrdom of imam Hussain and Battle of Karbala, called noha (نوحہ) and marsia. Anees and Dabeer are famous in this regard.

History

Main article: History of Urdu

Urdu developed as local Indo-Aryan dialects came under the influence of the Muslim courts that ruled South Asia from the early thirteenth century. The official language of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and their successor states, as well as the cultured language of poetry and literature, was Persian, while the language of religion was Arabic. Most of the Sultans and nobility in the Sultanate period were Persianized Turks from Central Asia who spoke Turkish as their mother tongue. The Mughals were also Turks from Cental Asia and spoke Persian as a second language. The mingling of these languages led to a vernacular that is the ancestor of today's Urdu. Dialects of this vernacular are spoken today in cities and villages throughout Pakistan and northern India. Cities with a particularly strong tradition of Urdu include Hyderabad, Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, and Lucknow.

The birthplace of the Urdu language is not known with certainty. Urdu literature has been found from the Delhi Sultanate. One hypothesis proposes that Urdu originated in or around Delhi over a period of several centuries, and that initially it was used and adopted by Muslims. The word Urdu itself comes from the Turkish word ordu, "tent" or "army", from which we get the word "horde". Hence Urdu is sometimes called "Lashkari zaban" or the language of the army. Furthermore, armies of India often contained soldiers with various native tounges. Hence, Urdu was the chosen language to address the soldiers as it abridged several languages.

Wherever Muslim soldiers and officials settled, they carried Urdu with them. Urdu (along with Persian) enjoyed commanding status in the literary courts of Muslim rulers and nawabs, and flourished under their patronage, partially displacing Sanskrit as the language of religious intellectuals in Indian society. The prestige bestowed upon Urdu at the expense of Sanskrit was a source of irritation for many religious Hindus, and to this day there remains religiously motivated conflict between the languages that sometimes makes dialogue difficult.

Urdu and Hindi

Standard Urdu and Standard Hindi are distinct languages. There are two fundamental distinctions between them: the source of borrowed vocabulary (Persian or Sanskrit), and the script used to write them (an adaptation of the Persian script written in Nasta'liq style, or the devanagari alphabet). In colloquial situations in Delhi, where neither learned vocabulary nor writing is used, the distinction between the Urdu and Hindi is nearly meaningless. Outside of the Delhi dialect area, the distinction may be more pronounced even in colloquial speech, for "Hindi" in such cases will often refer to the local dialect.

The word 'Hindi' has two uses; confusion of these is one of the primary causes of debate about the identity of Urdu.

• One use of 'Hindi' is to indicate those idioms in the North Indian dialect continuum that are not recognized as separate languages from the language of Delhi. Bengali and Nepali are not considered Hindi because of their long history as literary languages and because of official recognition. Panjabi, Bihari, and Chhatisghari are also often recognized to be distinct languages, though sometimes considered Hindi dialects. However, many other local idioms, such as the Bhili languages, which do not have such a distinct identity, are almost always considered to be dialects of Hindi. In other words, the boundaries of "Hindi" have little to do with mutual intelligibility, and instead depend on social perceptions of what constitutes a language.
• The other use of the word is Standard Hindi, the specific form (Khariboli) of the Delhi dialect of Hindi (generally called Hindustani) that is India's foremost national language.

Standard Urdu is also a standardized form of Hindustani. Such a state of affairs, with two standardized forms of what is essentially one language, is known as a diasystem.

Colloquial Urdu, on the other hand, basically is Hindustani; it can be argued that Standard Hindi is a form of colloquial Urdu, intentionally de-Persianized and de-Arabicized, with its formal vocabulary borrowed instead from Sanskrit. The colloquial language spoken by villagers and the lower classes of Delhi is indistinguishable by ear, whether it is called Hindi or Urdu by its speakers. The only important distinction at this level is in the script: if written in the Arab-Persian script, the language is generally considered to be Urdu, and if written in devanagari it is generally considered to be Hindi. However, since independence the formal registers used in education and the media have become increasingly divergent in their vocabulary. Where there is no colloquial word for a concept, Standard Urdu uses Perso-Arabic vocabulary, while Standard Hindi uses Sanskrit vocabulary. This results in the official languages being heavily Sanskritized or Persianized, and nearly unintelligible to speakers educated in the other standard.

These two standardized registers of Hindustani have become so entrenched as separate languages that often nationalists, both Hindu and Muslim, claim that Hindi and Urdu have always been separate languages. However, there are unifying forces as well. For example, it is said that Indian Bollywood films are made in "Hindi", but the language used in most of them is the same as that of Urdu speakers in Pakistan. The dialogue is frequently developed in English and later translated to an intentionally neutral Hindustani which can be easily understood by speakers of most North Indian languages, both in India itself and in Pakistan.

Footnote

¹As in Ghalib's famous couplet where he compares himself to his great predecessor, the master poet Mir :

Urdu Script

ریختــہ کے تــم ہـی استــاد نہیں ہـو غــالب

کہتے ہیں اگلے زمانے میں کوئی میر بھی تھا

Romanized

Raikhtha ke tum hee ustadh nahee ho Ghalib

Kehthay hain aglay zamaanay main ko'ee Mir bhee thhaa

Translation

You, alone, are not the only expert of 'Raikhta', Ghalib

It is said that even once there existed someone named, Mir

Urdu Urdu Urduo Ourdou Urdú 우르두어 उर्दू भाषा Bahasa Urdu Lingua urdu ურდუ Bahasa Urdu Urdu ウルドゥー語 Język urdu Língua urdu Урду Urdu Urduta:உருது ภาษาอูรดู Urduca اردو 乌尔都语