Back Bahsa Urdu ACE Oerdoe AF ኡርዱ AM Idioma urdú AN Urdusc sprǣc ANG उर्दू भाषा ANP اللغة الأردية Arabic ܠܫܢܐ ܕܐܘܪܕܘ ARC ؤردو ARY اوردو ARZ

Urdu

Urdu
Standard Urdu
اُردُو
Urdu written in the Nastaliq calligraphic hand
Pronunciation[ʊɾˈduː] ⓘ
Region
SpeakersL1: 70 million (2011–2017)[4]
L2: 170 million (2020)[4]
Early forms
Dialects
Indian Signing System
Official status
Official language in
Recognised minority
language in
South Africa (protected language)[9]
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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Urdu (/ˈʊərduː/; اردو, [ʊɾˈduː] ⓘ; ALA-LC: Urdū) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia.[10][11] It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, where it is also an official language alongside English.[12] In India, Urdu is an Eighth Schedule language, the status and cultural heritage of which are recognised by the Constitution of India;[13][14] and it also has an official status in several Indian states.[note 1][12] In Nepal, Urdu is a registered regional dialect[15] and in South Africa it is a protected language in the constitution. It is also spoken as a minority language in Afghanistan and Bangladesh, with no official status.

Urdu has been described as a Persianised register of the Hindustani language;[16][17] Urdu and Hindi share a common Sanskrit- and Prakrit-derived vocabulary base, phonology, syntax, and grammar, making them mutually intelligible during colloquial communication.[18][19] While formal Urdu draws literary, political, and technical vocabulary from Persian,[20] formal Hindi draws these aspects from Sanskrit; consequently, the two languages' mutual intelligibility effectively decreases as the factor of formality increases.

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.[21] Religious, social, and political factors arose during the European colonial period that advocated a distinction between Urdu and Hindi, leading to the Hindi–Urdu controversy.[22]

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.[23][24]


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  1. ^ "Data Tables". Census of India. 2011. Retrieved 25 March 2024.
  2. ^ "Languages - The World Factbook". www.cia.gov. Retrieved 25 March 2024.
  3. ^ "Population Monograph of Nepal Volume II (Social Demography)" (PDF).
  4. ^ a b Urdu at Ethnologue (27th ed., 2024) Closed access icon
  5. ^ "Urdu second official language in Andhra Pradesh". Deccan Chronicles. 24 March 2022. Retrieved 25 March 2022.
  6. ^ "Bill recognising Urdu as second official language passed". The Hindu. 23 March 2022. Retrieved 1 April 2022.
  7. ^ "Urdu is Telangana's second official language". The Indian Express. 16 November 2017. Retrieved 27 February 2018.
  8. ^ "Urdu is second official language in Telangana as state passes Bill". The News Minute. 17 November 2017. Retrieved 27 February 2018.
  9. ^ "Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 - Chapter 1: Founding Provisions". www.gov.za. Retrieved 6 December 2014.
  10. ^ Urdu language, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 5 December 2019, retrieved 17 October 2020, member of the Indo-Aryan group within the Indo-European family of languages. Urdu is spoken as a first language by nearly 70 million people and as a second language by more than 100 million people, predominantly in Pakistan and India. It is the official state language of Pakistan and is also officially recognized, or "scheduled," in the constitution of India.
  11. ^ Urdu (n), Oxford English Dictionary, June 2020, retrieved 11 September 2020, An Indo-Aryan language of northern South Asia (now esp. Pakistan), closely related to Hindi but written in a modified form of the Arabic script and having many loanwords from Persian and Arabic.
  12. ^ a b c 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.
  13. ^ 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."
  14. ^ 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.
  15. ^ "National Languages Policy Recommendation Commission" (PDF). MOE Nepal. 1994. p. Appendix one. Archived from the original (PDF) on 26 March 2023. Retrieved 14 March 2021.
  16. ^ 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.
  17. ^ 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.
  18. ^ 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.
  19. ^ 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.
  20. ^ 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.
  21. ^ 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.
  22. ^ 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.
  23. ^ 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.
  24. ^ "World", The World Factbook, Central Intelligence Agency, 20 November 2023, retrieved 27 November 2023


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