Urdu

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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]
Indo-European
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
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Urdu (/ˈʊərd/; 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

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]

Etymology

The name Urdu was first used by the poet

Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780 for Hindustani language[25][26] even though he himself also used Hindavi term in his poetry to define the language.[27] Ordu means army in the Turkic languages. In late 18th century, it was known as Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla زبانِ اُرْدُوئے مُعَلّٰی means language of the exalted camp.[28][29][30] Earlier it was known as Hindvi, Hindi and Hindustani.[26][31]

History

Urdu, like

Shauraseni language, a Middle Indo-Aryan language that is also the ancestor of other modern Indo-Aryan languages.[35][36]

Origins

In the Delhi region of India the native language was

Western Hindi group of the Central Indo-Aryan languages.[41][42] The contact of Hindu and Muslim cultures during the period of Islamic conquests in the Indian subcontinent (12th to 16th centuries) led to the development of Hindustani as a product of a composite Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb.[43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][excessive citations
]

In cities such as Delhi, the ancient language

Dakhini, which contains loanwords from Telugu and Marathi.[57][58][59]

From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century; the language now known as Urdu was called Hindi,[26] Hindavi, Hindustani,[31] Dehlavi,[60] Dihlawi,[61] Lahori,[60] and Lashkari.[62] The Delhi Sultanate established Persian as its official language in India, a policy continued by the Mughal Empire, which extended over most of northern South Asia from the 16th to 18th centuries and cemented Persian influence on Hindustani.[63][51]

Opening pages of the Urdu divan of Ghalib, 1821

According to the Navadirul Alfaz by Khan-i Arzu, the "Zaban-e Urdu-e Shahi" [language of the Imperial Camp] had attained special importance in the time of Alamgir".[64] By the end of the reign of Aurangzeb in the early 1700s, the common language around Delhi began to be referred to as Zaban-e-Urdu,[29] a name derived from the Turkic word ordu (army) or orda and is said to have arisen as the "language of the camp", or "Zaban-i-Ordu" means "Language of High camps"[28] or natively "Lashkari Zaban" means "Language of Army"[65] even though term Urdu held different meanings at that time.[66] It is recorded that Aurangzeb spoke in Hindvi, which was most likely Persianized, as there are substantial evidence that Hindvi was written in the Persian script in this period.[67]

During this time period Urdu was referred to as "Moors", which simply meant Muslim,[68] by European writers.[69] John Ovington wrote in 1689:[70]

The language of the Moors is different from that of the ancient original inhabitants of India but is obliged to these Gentiles for its characters. For though the Moors dialect is peculiar to themselves, yet it is destitute of Letters to express it; and therefore, in all their Writings in their Mother Tongue, they borrow their letters from the Heathens, or from the Persians, or other Nations.

In 1715, a complete literary Diwan in Rekhta was written by

Nastaleeq writing system[41][75] – which was developed as a style of Persian calligraphy.[76]

Other historical names

Throughout the history of the language, Urdu has been referred to by several other names: Hindi, Hindavi, Rekhta, Urdu-e-Muallah,

Dehlavi
.

In 1773, the Swiss French soldier Antoine Polier notes that the English liked to use the name "Moors" for Urdu:[77]

I have a deep knowledge [je possède à fond] of the common tongue of India, called Moors by the English, and Ourdouzebain by the natives of the land.

Several works of Sufi writers like Ashraf Jahangir Semnani used similar names for the Urdu language. Shah Abdul Qadir Raipuri was the first person who translated The Quran into Urdu.[78]

During Shahjahan's time, the Capital was relocated to Delhi and named Shahjahanabad and the Bazar of the town was named Urdu e Muallah.[79][80]

In the Akbar era the word Rekhta was used to describe Urdu for the first time. It was originally a Persian word that meant "to create a mixture". Amir Khusrau was the first person to use the same word for Poetry.[81]

Colonial period

Before the standardisation of Urdu into colonial administration, British officers often referred to the language as "Moors" or "Moorish jargon". John Gilchrist was the first in British India to begin a systematic study on Urdu and began to use the term "Hindustani" what the majority of Europeans called "Moors", authoring the book The Strangers's East Indian Guide to the Hindoostanee or Grand Popular Language of India (improperly Called Moors).[82]

Urdu was then promoted in

Persian as the official languages in northern parts of India in 1837.[88] In colonial Indian Islamic schools, Muslims were taught Persian and Arabic as the languages of Indo-Islamic civilisation; the British, in order to promote literacy among Indian Muslims and attract them to attend government schools, started to teach Urdu written in the Perso-Arabic script in these governmental educational institutions and after this time, Urdu began to be seen by Indian Muslims as a symbol of their religious identity.[84] Hindus in northwestern India, under the Arya Samaj agitated against the sole use of the Perso-Arabic script and argued that the language should be written in the native Devanagari script,[89] which triggered a backlash against the use of Hindi written in Devanagari by the Anjuman-e-Islamia of Lahore.[89] Hindi in the Devanagari script and Urdu written in the Perso-Arabic script established a sectarian divide of "Urdu" for Muslims and "Hindi" for Hindus, a divide that was formalised with the partition of colonial India into the Dominion of India and the Dominion of Pakistan after independence (though there are Hindu poets who continue to write in Urdu, including Gopi Chand Narang and Gulzar).[90][91]

Urdu had been used as a literary medium for British colonial Indian writers from the

Post-Partition

Before independence,

Bollywood films and songs.[98][99][100]

There have been attempts to purge Urdu of native Prakrit and Sanskrit words, and Hindi of Persian loanwords – new vocabulary draws primarily from Persian and Arabic for Urdu and from Sanskrit for Hindi.[101][102] English has exerted a heavy influence on both as a co-official language.[103] According to Bruce (2021), Urdu has adapted English words since the eighteenth century.[104] A movement towards the hyper-Persianisation of an Urdu emerged in Pakistan since its independence in 1947 which is "as artificial as" the hyper-Sanskritised Hindi that has emerged in India;[105] hyper-Persianisation of Urdu was prompted in part by the increasing Sanskritisation of Hindi.[106][page needed] However, the style of Urdu spoken on a day-to-day basis in Pakistan is akin to neutral Hindustani that serves as the lingua franca of the northern Indian subcontinent.[107][108]

Since at least 1977,

Bollywood[114] to social media, knowledge of the Urdu script and the publication of books in Urdu have steadily declined, while policies of the Indian government do not actively support the preservation of Urdu in professional and official spaces.[116] Because the Pakistani government proclaimed Urdu the national language at Partition, the Indian state and some religious nationalists began in part to regard Urdu as a 'foreign' language, to be viewed with suspicion.[113] Urdu advocates in India disagree whether it should be allowed to write Urdu in the Devanagari and Latin script (Roman Urdu) to allow its survival,[115][120] or whether this will only hasten its demise and that the language can only be preserved if expressed in the Perso-Arabic script.[116]

For Pakistan, Willoughby & Aftab (2020) argued that Urdu originally had the image of a refined elite language of the Enlightenment, progress and emancipation, which contributed to the success of the independence movement.[118] But after the 1947 Partition, when it was chosen as the national language of Pakistan to unite all inhabitants with one linguistic identity, it faced serious competition primarily from Bengali (spoken by 56% of the total population, mostly in East Pakistan until that attained independence in 1971 as Bangladesh), and after 1971 from English. Both pro-independence elites that formed the leadership of the Muslim League in Pakistan and the Hindu-dominated Congress Party in India had been educated in English during the British colonial period, and continued to operate in English and send their children to English-medium schools as they continued dominate both countries' post-Partition politics.[118] Although the Anglicized elite in Pakistan has made attempts at Urduisation of education with varying degrees of success, no successful attempts were ever made to Urduise politics, the legal system, the army, or the economy, all of which remained solidly Anglophone.[118] Even the regime of general Zia-ul-Haq (1977–1988), who came from a middle-class Punjabi family and initially fervently supported a rapid and complete Urduisation of Pakistani society (earning him the honorary title of the 'Patron of Urdu' in 1981), failed to make significant achievements, and by 1987 had abandoned most of his efforts in favour of pro-English policies.[118] Since the 1960s, the Urdu lobby and eventually the Urdu language in Pakistan has been associated with religious Islamism and political national conservatism (and eventually the lower and lower-middle classes, alongside regional languages such as Punjabi, Sindhi, and Balochi), while English has been associated with the internationally oriented secular and progressive left (and eventually the upper and upper-middle classes).[118] Despite governmental attempts at Urduisation of Pakistan, the position and prestige of English only grew stronger in the meantime.[118]

Demographics and geographic distribution

Geographical distribution of Urdu in India and Pakistan.

There are over 100 million native speakers of Urdu in India and Pakistan together: there were 50.8 million Urdu speakers in India (4.34% of the total population) as per the 2011 census;[1] and approximately 16 million in Pakistan in 2006.[121] There are several hundred thousand in the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, United States, and Bangladesh.[23] However, Hindustani, of which Urdu is one variety, is spoken much more widely, forming the third most commonly spoken language in the world, after Mandarin and English.[122] The syntax (grammar), morphology, and the core vocabulary of Urdu and Hindi are essentially identical – thus linguists usually count them as one single language, while some contend that they are considered as two different languages for socio-political reasons.[123]

Owing to interaction with other languages, Urdu has become localised wherever it is spoken, including in Pakistan. Urdu in Pakistan has undergone changes and has incorporated and borrowed many words from regional languages, thus allowing speakers of the language in Pakistan to distinguish themselves more easily and giving the language a decidedly Pakistani flavor. Similarly, the Urdu spoken in India can also be distinguished into many dialects such as the Standard Urdu of

Dakhni (Deccan) of South India.[124][57] Because of Urdu's similarity to Hindi, speakers of the two languages can easily understand one another if both sides refrain from using literary vocabulary.[18]

Pakistan

2017 Pakistan Census

Although Urdu is widely spoken and understood throughout all of Pakistan,

.

No region in Pakistan uses Urdu as its mother tongue, though it is spoken as the first language of Muslim migrants (known as

provinces/territories of Pakistan, and together with English as the main languages of instruction,[131] although the people from differing provinces may have different native languages.[132]

Urdu is taught as a compulsory subject up to higher secondary school in both English and Urdu medium school systems, which has produced millions of second-language Urdu speakers among people whose native language is one of the other languages of Pakistan – which in turn has led to the absorption of vocabulary from various regional Pakistani languages,[133] while some Urdu vocabularies has also been assimilated by Pakistan's regional languages.[134] Some who are from a non-Urdu background now can read and write only Urdu. With such a large number of people(s) speaking Urdu, the language has acquired a peculiar Pakistani flavor further distinguishing it from the Urdu spoken by native speakers, resulting in more diversity within the language.[135][clarification needed]

India

In India, Urdu is spoken in places where there are large Muslim minorities or cities that were bases for Muslim empires in the past. These include parts of

Hyderabad district, Telangana
(43.35% Telugu speakers and 43.24% Urdu speakers).

Some Indian Muslim schools (

Bollywood films tend to contain a large number of Persian and Arabic words and thus considered to be "Urdu" in a sense,[138] especially in songs.[139]

India has more than 3,000 Urdu publications, including 405 daily Urdu newspapers.[140][141] Newspapers such as Neshat News Urdu, Sahara Urdu, Daily Salar, Hindustan Express, Daily Pasban, Siasat Daily, The Munsif Daily and Inqilab are published and distributed in Bangalore, Malegaon, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.[142]

Elsewhere

signboard in Arabic, English and Urdu in the UAE
. The Urdu sentence is not a direct translation of the English ("Your beautiful city invites you to preserve it.") It says, "apné shahar kī Khūbsūrtīi ko barqarār rakhié, or "Please preserve the beauty of your city."

Outside South Asia, it is spoken by large numbers of migrant South Asian workers in the major urban centres of the

Arabic, Urdu is among the immigrant languages with the most speakers in Catalonia.[144]

Cultural identity

Colonial India

Religious and social atmospheres in early nineteenth century India played a significant role in the development of the Urdu register. Hindi became the distinct register spoken by those who sought to construct a Hindu identity in the face of colonial rule.[22] As Hindi separated from Hindustani to create a distinct spiritual identity, Urdu was employed to create a definitive Islamic identity for the Muslim population in India.[145] Urdu's use was not confined only to northern India – it had been used as a literary medium for Indian writers from the Bombay Presidency, Bengal, Orissa Province, and Tamil Nadu as well.[146]

As Urdu and Hindi became means of religious and social construction for Muslims and Hindus respectively, each register developed its own script. According to Islamic tradition,

Qur'an, holds spiritual significance and power.[147] Because Urdu was intentioned as means of unification for Muslims in Northern India and later Pakistan, it adopted a modified Perso-Arabic script.[148][22]

Pakistan

Urdu continued its role in developing a Pakistani identity as the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was established with the intent to construct a homeland for the Muslims of Colonial India. Several languages and dialects spoken throughout the regions of Pakistan produced an imminent need for a uniting language. Urdu was chosen as a symbol of unity for the new

British Indian Empire.[149] Urdu is also seen as a repertory for the cultural and social heritage of Pakistan.[150]

While Urdu and Islam together played important roles in developing the national identity of Pakistan, disputes in the 1950s (particularly those in East Pakistan, where Bengali was the dominant language), challenged the idea of Urdu as a national symbol and its practicality as the lingua franca. The significance of Urdu as a national symbol was downplayed by these disputes when English and Bengali were also accepted as official languages in the former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).[151]

Official status

Pakistan

Urdu is the sole national, and one of the two official languages of Pakistan (along with English).

provincial languages, although only 7.57% of Pakistanis speak Urdu as their first language.[152] Its official status has meant that Urdu is understood and spoken widely throughout Pakistan as a second or third language. It is used in education, literature, office and court business,[153] although in practice, English is used instead of Urdu in the higher echelons of government.[154] Article 251(1) of the Pakistani Constitution mandates that Urdu be implemented as the sole language of government, though English continues to be the most widely used language at the higher echelons of Pakistani government.[155]

India

A multilingual New Delhi railway station board. The Urdu and Hindi texts both read as: naī dillī.

Urdu is also one of the officially recognised languages in

Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Telangana and the national capital territory Delhi.[156][157] Also as one of the five official languages of Jammu and Kashmir.[158]

India established the governmental Bureau for the Promotion of Urdu in 1969, although the Central Hindi Directorate was established earlier in 1960, and the promotion of Hindi is better funded and more advanced,[159] while the status of Urdu has been undermined by the promotion of Hindi.[160] Private Indian organisations such as the Anjuman-e-Tariqqi Urdu, Deeni Talimi Council and Urdu Mushafiz Dasta promote the use and preservation of Urdu, with the Anjuman successfully launching a campaign that reintroduced Urdu as an official language of Bihar in the 1970s.[159] In the former Jammu and Kashmir state, section 145 of the Kashmir Constitution stated: "The official language of the State shall be Urdu but the English language shall unless the Legislature by law otherwise provides, continue to be used for all the official purposes of the State for which it was being used immediately before the commencement of the Constitution."[161]

Dialects

Urdu became a literary language in the 18th century and two similar standard forms came into existence in Delhi and Lucknow. Since the partition of India in 1947, a third standard has arisen in the Pakistani city of Karachi.[124][162] Deccani, an older form used in southern India, became a court language of the Deccan sultanates by the 16th century.[163][162] Urdu has a few recognised dialects, including

southern India. It is distinct by its mixture of vocabulary from Marathi and Konkani, as well as some vocabulary from Arabic, Persian and Chagatai that are not found in the standard dialect of Urdu. Dakhini is widely spoken in all parts of Maharashtra, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Urdu is read and written as in other parts of India. A number of daily newspapers and several monthly magazines in Urdu are published in these states.[citation needed
]

Bengali Language Movement in the 20th century. It is not officially recognised by the Government of Bangladesh. The Urdu spoken by Stranded Pakistanis in Bangladesh is different from this dialect.[citation needed
]

Code switching

Many bilingual or multi-lingual Urdu speakers, being familiar with both Urdu and English, display code-switching (referred to as "Urdish") in certain localities and between certain social groups. On 14 August 2015, the Government of Pakistan launched the Ilm Pakistan movement, with a uniform curriculum in Urdish. Ahsan Iqbal, Federal Minister of Pakistan, said "Now the government is working on a new curriculum to provide a new medium to the students which will be the combination of both Urdu and English and will name it Urdish."[164][165][166]

Comparison with Modern Standard Hindi

Urdu and Hindi on a road sign in India. The Urdu version is a direct transliteration of the English; the Hindi is a part transliteration ("parcel" and "rail") and part translation "karyalay" and "arakshan kendra"

Standard Urdu is often

Standard Hindi.[167] Both Urdu and Hindi, which are considered standard registers of the same language, Hindustani (or Hindi-Urdu), share a core vocabulary and grammar.[168][17][18][169]

Apart from religious associations, the differences are largely restricted to the

Nastaliq style of the Persian alphabet and relies heavily on Persian and Arabic as a source for technical and literary vocabulary,[170] whereas Standard Hindi is conventionally written in Devanāgarī and draws on Sanskrit.[171] However, both share a core vocabulary of native Sanskrit and Prakrit derived words and a significant amount of Arabic and Persian loanwords, with a consensus of linguists considering them to be two standardised forms of the same language[172][173] and consider the differences to be sociolinguistic;[174] a few classify them separately.[175] The two languages are often considered to be a single language (Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu) on a dialect continuum ranging from Persianised to Sanskritised vocabulary,[160] but now they are more and more different in words due to politics.[138] Old Urdu dictionaries also contain most of the Sanskrit words now present in Hindi.[176][177]

Mutual intelligibility decreases in literary and specialised contexts that rely on academic or technical vocabulary. In a longer conversation, differences in formal vocabulary and pronunciation of some Urdu

phonemes are noticeable, though many native Hindi speakers also pronounce these phonemes.[178] At a phonological level, speakers of both languages are frequently aware of the Perso-Arabic or Sanskrit origins of their word choice, which affects the pronunciation of those words.[179] Urdu speakers will often insert vowels to break up consonant clusters found in words of Sanskritic origin, but will pronounce them correctly in Arabic and Persian loanwords.[180] As a result of religious nationalism since the partition of British India
and continued communal tensions, native speakers of both Hindi and Urdu frequently assert that they are distinct languages.

The grammar of Hindi and Urdu is shared,[168][181] though formal Urdu makes more use of the Persian "-e-" izafat grammatical construct (as in Hammam-e-Qadimi, or Nishan-e-Haider) than does Hindi.

Urdu speakers by country

The following table shows the number of Urdu speakers in some countries.

Country Population Native language speakers % Native speakers and second-language speakers %
 India 1,296,834,042[182] 50,772,631[183] 3.9 12,151,715[183] 0.9
 Pakistan 207,862,518[184] 14,700,000[185][186] 7 164,000,000[23] 77%
 Saudi Arabia 33,091,113[187] 2.3 930,000[183] -
   Nepal 29,717,587[188] 691,546[189] 2.3 -
 Afghanistan 38,347,000[190] 733,000[190] -
 Bangladesh 159,453,001[191] 300,000[192] 0.1 -
United Kingdom
65,105,246[193] 269,000[23] 0.4 -
 United States 329,256,465[194] 397,502[195] 0.1 -
 United Arab Emirates 9,890,400 300,000 [citation needed] 3.0 1,500,000[citation needed] 15.1
 Canada 35,881,659[196] 243,090[197] 0.6 -
 Australia 25,422,788[198] 111,873[198] 0.4
 Ireland 4,761,865 5,336[199] 0.1

Phonology

Consonants

Consonant phonemes of Urdu[200][201]
Labial Dental Alveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar Uvular Glottal
Nasal m م
n
ن
ŋ ن٘
Affricate
voiceless p پ
t
ت
ʈ ٹ چ k ک (q) ق
voiceless aspirated پھ تھ ʈʰ ٹھ tʃʰ چھ کھ
voiced b ب
d
د
ɖ ڈ ج ɡ گ
voiced aspirated بھ دھ ɖʱ ڈھ dʒʱ جھ گھ
Flap/Trill
plain
r
ر
ɽ ڑ
aspirated
ɽʱ ڑھ
Fricative
voiceless f ف s س ʃ ش x خ ɦ ہ
voiced ʋ و z ز (ʒ) ژ (ɣ) غ
Approximant
l
ل
j ی
Notes
  • Marginal and non-universal phonemes are in parentheses.
  • /ɣ/ is post-velar.[202]

Vowels

Urdu vowels[203][204][200][201]
Front Central Back
short
long
short long short long
Close oral ɪ ʊ
nasal ɪ̃ ĩː ʊ̃ ũː
Close-mid oral ə
nasal ẽː ə̃ õː
Open-mid oral ɛ ɛː ɔ ɔː
nasal ɛ̃ː ɔ̃ː
Open oral (æː)
nasal (æ̃ː) ãː
Notes
  • This table contains a list of phones, not phonemes. In particular, [ɛ] is an allophone of /ə/ near /h/, and the short nasal vowels are not phonemic either.
  • Marginal and non-universal vowels are in parentheses.

Vocabulary