Urdu - Wikipedia

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Urdu language
Indo-Aryan language
Urdu
اردو
Urdū
Urdu
written in the
Nastaliq
calligraphic hand
Pronunciation
[ˈʊɾd̪uː]
Native to
South Asia
Region
Pakistan
lingua franca
Hindi–Urdu Belt
and
Deccan
India
Terai
Nepal
Old Dhaka
Bangladesh
See
geographical distribution of Urdu speakers
for more
Speakers
L1
: 78 million (2011–2023)
L2
: 168 million (2011–2020)
Total: 246 million (2011–2023)
Language family
Indo-European
Indo-Iranian
Indo-Aryan
Central Zone
Western Hindi
Hindustani
Urdu
Early forms
Shauraseni Prakrit
Apabhraṃśa
Old Hindi
Hindustani
Rekhta
Dialects
Begamati
Deccani
Dhakaiya
Judeo-Urdu
Kalkatiya
Karkhandari
Writing system
Perso-Arabic script
Urdu alphabet
Urdu Braille
Official status
Official language in
Pakistan
(national)
India
(scheduled)
Jammu and Kashmir
Ladakh
Delhi
(additional)
Bihar
(additional)
Uttar Pradesh
(additional)
Jharkhand
(additional)
Andhra Pradesh
(additional)
Telangana
(additional)
West Bengal
(additional)
Recognised minority
language in
South Africa
(protected language)
Regulated by
National Language Promotion Department
(Pakistan)
National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language
(India)
Language codes
ISO 639-1
ur
ISO 639-2
urd
ISO 639-3
urd
Glottolog
urdu1245
Linguasphere
59-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
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Without proper
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This article contains
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Urdu script
Part of
a series
on the
Hindustani language
(or the
Hindi–Urdu
continuum)
Hindi
Urdu
Regional or dialectal variants
Andaman
Bihari
Bombay
Deccani
Dhakaiya
Hinglish
Hyderabadi
Judeo-Urdu
Kauravi
Rekhta
Urdish
History
Hindi–Urdu controversy
Persian and Urdu
Hindi literature
Urdu literature
Hindustani orthography
Grammar
Numerals
Declension
Verbs
Linguistic history
Vocabulary
Phonological history
Hindi–Urdu transliteration
Hindustani Braille
Hindi Braille
Urdu Braille
Roman Hindi
Roman Urdu
Indo-Pakistani Sign Language
Urdu
اُرْدُو
urdū
[ˈʊɾduː]
) is an
Indo-Aryan language
spoken primarily in
South Asia
. It is the
national language
and
lingua franca
of
Pakistan
. It is also an official
Eighth Schedule language
in
India
, the status and cultural heritage of which are recognised by the
Constitution of India
— alongside having official status in several Indian states (
Uttar Pradesh
Bihar
Jharkhand
West Bengal
, and both
Telugu states
).
Urdu and
Hindi
are closely related. They share a common, predominantly
Sanskrit
- and
Prakrit
-derived, vocabulary base,
phonology
syntax
, and grammar, making them
mutually intelligible
during
colloquial communication
12
13
14
15
The common base of the two languages is sometimes referred to as the
Hindi–Urdu
or
Hindustani language
, and Urdu has been described as a
Persianised
standard
of the Hindustani language.
16
17
18
19
While formal Urdu draws literary, political, and technical vocabulary from
Persian
and Arabic,
20
formal Hindi draws these aspects from Sanskrit; consequently, the two languages' mutual intelligibility effectively decreases as the level of formality increases.
21
Urdu originated geographically in the
upper Ganga-Yamuna doab
, in and around the
Delhi region
, where
Khari Boli
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.
22
23
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
24
25
26
According to 2026 estimates by
Ethnologue
, Urdu is the
10th-most widely spoken language in the world
, with 246 million total speakers, including those who speak it as a
second language
27
28
Etymology
The name
Urdu
was first used by the poet
Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi
around 1780 for the language,
29
30
even though he himself also used
Hindavi
term in his poetry to define the language.
31
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
32
33
34
It was previously known by several terms such as Hindvi, Hindi, Hindustani and Rekhta.
30
35
History
Main article:
History of Hindustani
Origins
Urdu is a part of the Hindi–Urdu linguistic continuum, which is commonly referred to as
Hindustani
in contemporary usage.
36
37
38
Some linguists have suggested that the earliest forms of Urdu evolved from the medieval (6th to 13th century)
Apabhraṃśa
register of the preceding
Shauraseni language
, a
Middle Indo-Aryan language
that is also the ancestor of other modern Indo-Aryan languages.
39
40
41
In the Delhi region of India, the native language was
Khariboli
, whose earliest form is known as
Old Hindi
(or Hindavi).
42
43
44
45
46
It belongs to the
Western Hindi
group of the Central Indo-Aryan languages.
47
48
The
contact of Hindu and Muslim cultures
during the period of
Muslim conquests in the Indian subcontinent
(12th to 16th centuries) led to the development of Hindustani as a product of a composite
Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb
49
50
51
52
In cities such as Delhi, the ancient language Old Hindi began to acquire many
Persian
loanwords and continued to be called "Hindi" and later, also "Hindustani".
45
35
53
30
47
An early literary tradition of Hindavi was founded by
Amir Khusrau
in the late 13th century,
54
55
56
57
who has been called "the father of Urdu literature".
58
After the conquest of the
Deccan
, and a subsequent immigration of noble Muslim families into the south, a form of the language flourished in
medieval India
as a vehicle of poetry, (especially under the
Bahmanids
),
59
and is known as
Dakhini
, which contains loanwords from
Telugu
and
Marathi
60
61
62
From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century, the language now known as Urdu was called
Hindi
30
Hindavi
Hindustani
35
Dehlavi
63
Dihlawi
64
Lahori
63
and
Lashkari
65
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 century to the 18th, and cemented Persian influence on Hindustani.
66
53
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
".
67
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
33
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
32
or natively "
Lashkari Zaban
" means "
Language
of
Army
68
even though the term
Urdu
held different meanings at that time.
69
It is recorded that Aurangzeb spoke in Hindvi, which was most likely Persianised, as there are substantial evidence that Hindvi was written in the Persian script in this period.
70
71
During this time period, Urdu was referred to as "Moors", which simply meant Muslim,
72
by European writers.
73
John Ovington wrote in 1689:
74
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
Nawab Sadruddin Khan
75
An Urdu-Persian dictionary was written by Khan-i Arzu in 1751 in the reign of
Ahmad Shah Bahadur
76
The name
Urdu
was first introduced by the poet
Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi
around 1780.
29
30
As a literary language, Urdu took shape in courtly, elite settings.
77
78
While Urdu retained the grammar and core Indo-Aryan vocabulary of the local Indian dialect Khariboli, it adopted the Perso-Arab writing system, written in the
Nastaleeq
style.
47
79
– which was developed as a style of Persian calligraphy.
80
Urdu was patronised by the
Nawab of Awadh
and in
Lucknow
, the language was refined, being not only spoken in the court, but by the common people in the city—both Hindus and Muslims; the city of Lucknow gave birth to Urdu prose literature, with a notable novel being
Umrao Jaan Ada
81
82
Other historical names
Throughout the history of the language, Urdu has been referred to by several other names: Hindi, Hindavi, Rekhta, Urdu-e-Muallah,
Dakhini
, Moors and
Dehlavi
In 1773, the Swiss French soldier
Antoine Polier
notes that the English liked to use the name "Moors" for Urdu:
83
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.
84
During Shahjahan's time, the Capital was relocated to Delhi and named
Shahjahanabad
and the Bazar of the town was named Urdu e Muallah.
85
86
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.
87
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)
88
Urdu was promoted in colonial India by British policies to counter the previous emphasis on Persian, and the language also gained official status in colonial India because it was the language of the Muslim elite (such as
Nawabs
and
Zamindars
).
89
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
90
In colonial India, ordinary Muslims and Hindus alike spoke the same language in the
United Provinces
in the nineteenth century, namely Hindustani, whether called by that name or whether called Hindi, Urdu, or one of the regional dialects such as
Braj
or
Awadhi
91
Elites from Muslim communities, as well as a minority of Hindu elites, such as
Munshis
of Hindu origin,
92
wrote the language in the Perso-Arabic script in courts and government offices, though Hindus continued to employ the Devanagari script in certain literary and religious contexts.
79
93
Through the late 19th century, people did not view Urdu and Hindi as being two distinct languages, though in urban areas, the standardised Hindustani language was increasingly being referred to as Urdu and written in the Perso-Arabic script.
94
Urdu and English replaced
Persian
as the official languages in northern parts of India in 1837.
95
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,
96
which triggered a backlash against the use of Hindi written in Devanagari by the Anjuman-e-Islamia of Lahore.
96
Advocacy for a standardised Hindi, based on Khari Boli, which would have equal official recognition did not begin until the 1860s,
97
Proponents of Hindi over Urdu as an authorised language also had to take into account the existence of numerous provincial languages such as Awadhi, Braj Bhasha, Bhojpuri, Bundeli, and Maithili, which were considered a part of older Hindi, but which would problematise dialogues for an official, modern standard Hindi.
98
Modern Standard Hindi
did not emerge before the 20th century.
99
100
The recognition of the Hindi script as an official script of courts in North India in 1900 was a key juncture in the evolution of Hindi-based language nationalism.
101
Hindi, which was still not altogether standardised by the 1910s,
102
and which had hitherto been considered an unrefined language was strictly patrolled to deliver a Sanskritic lexicon that did not permit influence of Urdu to be evident,
103
Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi
notably preparing the spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary of Modern Standard Hindi.
104
The
Hindi–Urdu controversy
in 1867, highlighted the linguistic and cultural divide between Hindus and Muslims in British India, with Urdu emerging as a symbol of the linguistic pride of Indian Muslims. This division played an important role in the political movement of Muslims, eventually leading to the formation of the
All-India Muslim League
in 1906, whose formation eventually resulted in the creation of Pakistan, as a separate Muslim state in the Indian subcontinent.
105
The controversy began to emerge when certain Hindu leaders and organisations, including the Banaras Institute and the Allahabad Institute, advocated for replacing Urdu with Hindi as the official language. This firm stance contributed to prompting
Sir Syed Ahmed Khan
—who was an advocate of the Hindu-Muslim unity, but later known as the 'Father of
Two-nation theory
'—to advocate for the use of Urdu.
106
He regarded Urdu as a symbol of Muslim heritage in the Indian subcontinent. Sir Syed also considered Urdu "a common legacy of Hindus and Muslims",
107
and supported the use of Urdu through his writings. Under Sir Syed, the
Scientific Society of Aligarh
translated Western works only into Urdu. The
Urdu movement
, which was a sociopolitical movement aimed at making Urdu as the universal lingua-franca of the Muslims of the subcontinent was fuelled by
Aligarh movement
of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. This movement strongly influenced the Muslim League and the
Pakistan Movement
During the 1937 Lucknow session of the All-India Muslim League, the Raja of Mahmudabad,
Mohammad Amir Ahmed Khan
encouraged Urdu-speaking communities in British India to actively support and safeguard the Urdu language using all possible means.
108
Liaquat Ali Khan
, who was later the first prime minister of Pakistan, stated in 1939: 'We left Arabic language for this India and for the Hindus, we left
Turkish language
and adopted a language which came into existence and made progress in this country – a language which is not spoken anywhere else. Now, it is demanded of us that we should speak the language of Balmeek. We have taken many steps forward for the sake of Hindu-Muslim unity. We shall not now take another step forward. We are standing at the edge of our limit. Anyone who wishes to meet us should come here'.
108
109
On 31 December 1939,
Sayyid Sulaiman Nadvi
, while delivering his presidential address at the Urdu Muslim Conference in
Calcutta
, said, "In the brightness of the modern-daylight, something darkly unfair is being done and which is that every government official from top to bottom is engaged in doing his utmost in promoting the cause of Hindi. In my opinion, it is a disfavour to the
Congress
rather than a favour; it is reinforcing the misconception in the minds of the Muslims that it is what we can do with half the powers, what else we will do with full powers; as a result of which the country will be divided into two parts."
110
108
A renowned Congressite,
Tufail Ahmad Manglori
, once acknowledged that the passage of a resolution against Urdu in the
United Provinces
caused deep distress among Muslims. He noted that the Hindi–Urdu controversy contributed to increasing divisions between the two communities, which continued to widen over time.
108
111
Before the establishment of Pakistan, many Muslims of colonial India actively supported Urdu as their national language, and the language emerged as a symbol of unity during the Pakistan Movement by demonstrating that it possessed all the essential traits to affirm the need for a separate state for the Muslims of colonial India.
112
British language policy played a role in shaping political developments that eventually led to the partition of colonial India into India and Pakistan. This outcome was paralleled by the linguistic divide of the Hindi–Urdu continuum, with the emergence of Sanskritised Hindi and Urdu adopting more Persian influences.
113
Urdu had been used as a literary medium for British colonial Indian writers from the
Bombay
Bengal
Orissa
114
and
Hyderabad State
as well.
115
Post-Partition
Before independence, Muslim League leader
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
advocated the use of Urdu, which he used as a symbol of national cohesion in Pakistan.
116
Like other Muslim religious and political leaders, The scholar and linguist
Maulvi Abdul Haq
, who has been called
Baba-e-Urdu
Father of Urdu
), also reinforced support for Urdu as the national language of Pakistan, calling it the lingua franca and a unifying force of the country.
117
Abdul Haq also stated: "Urdu Language placed the first brick in the foundation of Pakistan."
118
In the early years of Pakistan, the finance departments, bureaucracy, and other major institutions of the country were mostly managed by Urdu-speaking population of the country.
119
120
After the
Bengali language movement
and the separation of former
East Pakistan
121
Urdu was recognised as the sole national language of Pakistan in 1973, although English and regional languages were also granted official recognition.
122
When the
1972 language violence
in
Sindh
occurred, the poet
Rais Amrohvi
, who played a significant role in promoting Urdu and supporting the Urdu-speaking population of Pakistan,
123
wrote his famous poem
Urdu ka janaza hai zara dhoom say niklay
(It's Urdu's funeral, make it befitting!) as a tribute to the language.
124
Following the 1979
Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan
and subsequent arrival of millions of
Afghan refugees
who have lived in Pakistan for many decades, many Afghans, including those who moved back to Afghanistan,
125
have also become fluent in Hindi–Urdu, an occurrence aided by exposure to the Indian media, chiefly Hindi–Urdu
Bollywood
films and songs.
126
127
128
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.
129
130
English has exerted a heavy influence on both as a co-official language.
131
According to Bruce (2021), Urdu has adapted English words since the eighteenth century.
132
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;
133
hyper-Persianisation of Urdu was prompted in part by the increasing Sanskritisation of Hindi.
134
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.
135
136
In India, since at least 1977,
137
some commentators, such as journalist
Khushwant Singh
, have characterised Urdu as a 'dying language.' However, others, such as Indian poet and writer
Gulzar
—who is popular in both countries and both language communities but writes only in Urdu (script) and has difficulties reading Devanagari, so he lets others transcribe his work—disagree with this assessment and state that Urdu 'is the most alive language and moving ahead with times' in India.
138
139
140
137
141
142
143
This phenomenon pertains to the decrease in relative and absolute numbers of native Urdu speakers as opposed to speakers of other languages;
144
145
declining (advanced) knowledge of Urdu's Perso-Arabic script, Urdu vocabulary and grammar;
144
146
the role of translation and transliteration of literature from and into Urdu;
144
the shifting cultural image of Urdu and socio-economic status associated with Urdu speakers (which negatively impacts especially their employment opportunities in both countries),
146
144
the
de jure
legal status and
de facto
political status of Urdu,
146
how much Urdu is used as language of instruction and chosen by students in higher education,
146
144
145
143
and how the maintenance and development of Urdu is financially and institutionally supported by governments and NGOs.
146
144
In India, although Urdu is not and never was used exclusively by Muslims (and Hindi never exclusively by Hindus),
143
147
the ongoing
Hindi–Urdu controversy
and modern cultural association of each language with the two religions has led to fewer Hindus using Urdu.
143
147
In the 20th century, Indian Muslims gradually began to collectively embrace Urdu
147
(for example, 'post-independence Muslim politics of
Bihar
saw a mobilisation around the Urdu language as tool of empowerment for minorities especially coming from weaker socio-economic backgrounds'
144
), but in the early 21st century an increasing percentage of Indian Muslims began switching to Hindi due to socio-economic factors, such as Urdu being abandoned as the language of instruction in much of India,
145
144
and having limited employment opportunities compared to Hindi, English and regional languages.
143
The number of Urdu speakers in India fell 1.5% between 2001 and 2011 (then 5.08 million Urdu speakers), especially in the most Urdu-speaking states of
Uttar Pradesh
(c. 8% to 5%) and Bihar (c. 11.5% to 8.5%), even though the number of Muslims in these two states grew in the same period.
145
Although Urdu is still very prominent in early 21st-century Indian pop culture, ranging from
Bollywood
142
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.
144
Because during the partition, Urdu became the national language of Pakistan, the Indian state and some religious nationalists began in part to regard Urdu as a 'foreign' language, to be viewed with suspicion.
141
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,
143
148
or whether this will only hasten its demise and that the language can only be preserved if expressed in the Perso-Arabic script.
144
There are some Hindu poets in India who continue to write in Urdu after the partition, including
Gopi Chand Narang
and Gulzar Dehlvi.
149
Throughout India, various states have established an
Urdu Academy
to promote the use of Urdu and Urdu literature.
150
For Pakistan, Urdu originally had the image of a refined, elite language of the Enlightenment, progress, and emancipation, and the language contributed to the success of Pakistan's independence movement.
146
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.
146
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.
146
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.
146
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).
146
Despite governmental attempts at Urduisation of Pakistan, the position and prestige of English only grew stronger in the meantime.
146
Demographics and geographic distribution
See also:
Languages of Pakistan
and
Languages of India
Geographical distribution of Urdu in India and Pakistan.
Urdu as a first, second, and third largest mother tongue by district in 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;
151
and approximately 22.3 million in Pakistan (9.25% of the total population) in 2023. There are several hundred thousand in the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, United States, and
Bangladesh
28
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.
152
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.
153
Owing to interaction with other languages, Urdu has become localised wherever it is spoken, including in Pakistan. Though Urdu is spoken by many
Muhajirs
in its standard form. In some areas, it has borrowed words from regional languages, giving the language a peculiar regional flavor. Similarly, the Urdu spoken in India can also be distinguished into many dialects such as the Standard Urdu of
Lucknow
and Delhi, as well as the
Dakhni
Deccan
) of South India.
154
60
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.
12
Pakistan
The proportion of people with Urdu as their
mother tongue
in each Pakistani
district
as of the
2017 Pakistan census
Although Urdu is widely spoken and understood throughout all of Pakistan as the national language,
155
only 9.25% of the population reported it as their mother tongue, according to the
2023 Pakistani census
156
Most of the nearly three million Afghan refugees of different ethnic origins (such as
Pashtun
Tajik
Uzbek
Hazarvi
, and
Turkmen
) who stayed in Pakistan for over twenty-five years have also become fluent in Urdu.
128
Muhajirs since 1947 have historically formed the majority population in the city of
Karachi
, however.
157
Many newspapers are published in Urdu in Pakistan, including the
Daily Jang
Nawa-i-Waqt
, and
Millat
Urdu is spoken as the first language of many people among the community known as
Muhajirs
(a multi-origin ethnic group of Pakistan), who left India after independence in 1947; these Muhajirs were from various parts of India, with Urdu speakers predominantly hailing from
United Provinces
(Uttar Pradesh), Delhi,
Central Provinces
(Madhya Pradesh),
Bihar
and
Hyderabad
158
159
Other communities, most notably the
Punjabi elite
of Pakistan, have adopted Urdu as a
mother tongue
and identify with both an Urdu speaker as well as
Punjabi
identity.
160
161
Urdu has served as a
lingua franca
, especially among Muslims in north and northwest
British India
, as well as in
Hyderabad State
. It is written, spoken and used in all
provinces/territories of Pakistan
, and together with English as the main languages of instruction,
162
although the people from differing provinces may have different native languages.
163
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,
164
while some Urdu vocabularies has also been assimilated by Pakistan's regional languages.
165
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 regional flavor further distinguishing it from the Urdu spoken by native speakers, resulting in more diversity within the language.
166
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
Uttar Pradesh
, Madhya Pradesh,
Bihar
Telangana
, Andhra Pradesh,
Maharashtra
Marathwada
and Konkanis),
Karnataka
and cities such as
Hyderabad
Lucknow
, Delhi,
Malerkotla
Bareilly
Meerut
Saharanpur
Muzaffarnagar
Roorkee
Deoband
Moradabad
Azamgarh
Bijnor
Najibabad
Rampur
Aligarh
Allahabad
Gorakhpur
Agra
Firozabad
Kanpur
Badaun
Bhopal
Hyderabad
Aurangabad
167
Bangalore
Kolkata
Mysore
Patna
Darbhanga
Gaya
Madhubani
Samastipur
Siwan
Saharsa
Supaul
Muzaffarpur
Nalanda
Munger
Bhagalpur
Araria
Gulbarga
Parbhani
Nanded
Malegaon
Bidar
Ajmer
, and
Ahmedabad
168
In a very significant number among the nearly 800 districts of India, there is a small Urdu-speaking minority at least. In
Araria district
, Bihar, there is a plurality of Urdu speakers and near-plurality in
Hyderabad district, Telangana
(43.35% Telugu speakers and 43.24% Urdu speakers).
Some Indian Muslim schools (
Madrasa
) teach Urdu as a first language and have their own syllabi and exams.
169
In fact, the language of
Bollywood
films tend to contain a large number of Persian and Arabic words and thus considered to be "Urdu" in a sense,
170
especially in songs.
171
India has more than 3,000 Urdu publications, including 405 daily Urdu newspapers.
172
173
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
174
Elsewhere
A trilingual
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") or Arabic (the same). It says, "apné shahar kī Khūbsūrtīi ko barqarār rakhié, or "Please preserve the beauty of your city."
In
Nepal
, Urdu is a registered regional dialect
167
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.
Outside South Asia, it is spoken by large numbers of migrant South Asian workers in the major urban centres of the
Persian Gulf
countries. Urdu is also spoken by large numbers of immigrants and their children in the major urban centres of the
United Kingdom
, the United States, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, and Australia.
175
Along with Arabic, Urdu is among the immigrant languages with the most speakers in
Catalonia
176
Cultural identity
Further information:
Hindi–Urdu controversy
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.
90
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.
177
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.
178
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,
Arabic
, the language of
Muhammad
and the
Qur'an
, holds spiritual significance and power.
179
Because Urdu was intentioned as means of unification for Muslims in Northern India and later Pakistan, it adopted a modified Perso-Arabic script.
180
90
Pakistan
Urdu has played a central role in shaping Pakistan’s national identity, holding symbolic significance as a cultural identity in the country’s formation and as a common lingua franca. 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
Dominion of Pakistan
in 1947, and it had already served as a
lingua franca
among Muslims in north and northwest of
British Indian Empire
181
Urdu is also seen as a repertory for the
cultural
and social heritage of Pakistan.
182
While Urdu and the Muslim identity of the Indian subcontinent 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
).
183
Official status
Pakistan
Urdu is the sole national, and one of the two official languages of Pakistan (along with English).
122
It is spoken and understood throughout the country, whereas the state-by-state languages (languages spoken throughout various regions) are the
provincial languages
, although only 9.25% of Pakistanis speak Urdu as their first language.
184
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,
185
although in practice, English is used instead of Urdu in the higher echelons of government.
186
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.
187
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
India
and also has the status of
"additional official language"
in the
Indian states
of
Andhra Pradesh
, Uttar Pradesh,
Bihar
, Jharkhand,
West Bengal
Telangana
and the national capital territory Delhi.
188
189
It is also one of the five official languages of
Jammu and Kashmir
190
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,
191
while the status of Urdu has been undermined by the promotion of Hindi.
192
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.
191
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."
193
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
154
194
Deccani
, an older form used in
southern India
, became a court language of the
Deccan sultanates
by the 16th century.
195
194
Urdu has a few recognised dialects, including
Dakhni
Dhakaiya
Rekhta
, and Modern Vernacular Urdu (based on the
Khariboli
dialect of the Delhi region). Dakhni (also known as Dakani, Deccani, Desia, Mirgan) is spoken in
Deccan
region of
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
Dhakaiya Urdu
is a dialect native to the city of
Old Dhaka
in Bangladesh, dating back to the
Mughal era
. However, its popularity, even among native speakers, has been gradually declining since the
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."
196
197
198
Comparison with Modern Standard Hindi
Further information:
Hindi–Urdu controversy
Hindustani phonology
, and
Hindustani grammar
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
compared
with
Standard Hindi
199
Both Urdu and Hindi, which are considered standard registers of the same language,
Hindustani
(or Hindi–Urdu), share a core vocabulary and
grammar
200
19
12
201
Apart from religious associations, the differences are largely restricted to the
standard forms
: Standard Urdu is conventionally written in the
Nastaliq style
of the
Persian alphabet
and relies heavily on Persian and Arabic as a source for technical and literary vocabulary,
202
whereas Standard Hindi is conventionally written in
Devanāgarī
and draws on
Sanskrit
203
However, both share a core vocabulary of native
Sanskrit
and
Prakrit
derived words and a significant number of
Arabic
and Persian loanwords, with a consensus of linguists considering them to be two standardised forms of the same language
204
205
and consider the differences to be
sociolinguistic
206
a few classify them separately.
207
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,
192
but now they are more and more different in words due to politics.
170
Old Urdu dictionaries also contain most of the Sanskrit words now present in Hindi.
208
209
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.
210
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.
211
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.
212
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,
200
213
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
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listed sources
may not be
reliable
Please help improve this article by looking for better, more reliable sources. Unreliable citations may be challenged and removed.
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The following table shows the number of Urdu speakers in some countries.
Country
Population
Native language speakers
Second-language speakers
India
1,296,834,042
214
50,772,631
215
3.9
12,151,715
215
0.9
Pakistan
241,499,431
22,249,307
216
9.25
164,000,000
28
77%
Saudi Arabia
33,091,113
217
2.3
930,000
215
Nepal
29,717,587
218
414,000
219
2.3
Afghanistan
38,347,000
220
733,000
220
Bangladesh
159,453,001
221
300,000
222
0.1
United Kingdom
65,105,246
223
269,000
28
0.4
United States
329,256,465
224
397,502
225
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
226
243,090
227
0.6
Australia
25,422,788
228
111,873
228
0.4
Ireland
4,761,865
5,336
229
0.1
Phonology
Main article:
Hindustani phonology
Consonants
Consonant phonemes of Urdu
230
231
Labial
Dental
Alveolar
Retroflex
Palatal
Velar
Uvular
Glottal
Nasal
(‌‌
Plosive
Affricate
voiceless
tʃ
voiceless
aspirated
pʰ
پھ
tʰ
تھ
ʈʰ
ٹھ
tʃʰ
چھ
kʰ
کھ
voiced
dʒ
voiced
aspirated
bʱ
بھ
dʱ
دھ
ɖʱ
ڈھ
dʒʱ
جھ
gʱ
گھ
Flap
Trill
plain
voiced
aspirated
ɽʱ
ڑھ
Fricative
voiceless
voiced
Approximant
Notes
Marginal and non-universal phonemes are in parentheses.
/ɣ/
is
post-velar
232
Vowels
Urdu vowels
233
234
230
231
Front
Central
Back
short
long
short
long
short
long
Close
oral
iː
uː
nasal
ɪ̃
ĩː
ʊ̃
ũː
Close-mid
oral
eː
oː
nasal
ẽː
ə̃
õː
Open-mid
oral
ɛː
ɔː
nasal
ɛ̃ː
ɔ̃ː
Open
oral
æː
aː
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
Further information:
Hindustani etymology
Syed Ahmed Dehlavi, a 19th-century
lexicographer
who compiled the
Farhang-e-Asifiya
235
Urdu dictionary, estimated that 75% of Urdu words have their etymological roots in
Sanskrit
and
Prakrit
13
236
237
and approximately 99% of Urdu verbs have their roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit.
238
239
Urdu has borrowed words from Persian and to a lesser extent,
Arabic
through Persian,
240
to the extent of about 25%
13
236
237
241
to 30% of Urdu's vocabulary.
242
A table illustrated by the linguist Afroz Taj of the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
likewise illustrates the number of Persian loanwords to native Sanskrit-derived words in literary Urdu as comprising a 1:4 ratio.
237
The phrase Z
ubān-e-Urdū-e-Muʿallā
("the language of the exalted camp") written in the
Perso-Arabic
script
243
The "trend towards Persianisation" started in the 18th century by the Delhi school of Urdu poets, though other writers, such as
Meeraji
, wrote in a Sanskritised form of the language.
244
There has been a move towards hyper Persianisation in Pakistan since 1947, which has been adopted by much of the country's writers;
245
as such, some Urdu texts can be composed of 70% Perso-Arabic loanwords just as some Persian texts can have 70% Arabic vocabulary.
246
Some Pakistani Urdu speakers have incorporated Hindi vocabulary into their speech as a result of exposure to Indian entertainment.
247
248
In India, Urdu has not diverged from Hindi as much as it has in Pakistan.
249
Most borrowed words in Urdu are nouns and adjectives.
250
Many of the words of Arabic origin have been adopted through Persian,
13
and have different pronunciations and nuances of meaning and usage than they do in Arabic. There are also a smaller number of borrowings from
Portuguese
. Some examples for Portuguese words borrowed into Urdu are
chabi
("chave": key),
girja
("igreja": church),
kamra
("cámara": room),
qamīz
("camisa": shirt).
251
Although the word
Urdu
is derived from the
Turkic
word
ordu
(army) or
orda
, from which English
horde
is also derived,
252
Turkic borrowings in Urdu are minimal
253
and Urdu is also not
genetically related
to the
Turkic languages
. Urdu words originating from
Chagatai
and Arabic were borrowed through Persian and hence are Persianised versions of the original words. For instance, the Arabic
ta' marbuta
) changes to
he
) or
te
).
254
note 2
Nevertheless, contrary to popular belief, Urdu did not borrow from the
Turkish language
, but from
Chagatai
, a
Turkic language
from Central Asia.
citation needed
Urdu and Turkish both borrowed from Arabic and Persian, hence the similarity in pronunciation of many Urdu and Turkish words.
255
Formality
Lashkari Zabān
title in Naskh script
Urdu in its less formalised
is known as
rekhta
ریختہ
rek̤h̤tah
rough mixture
Urdu pronunciation:
[reːxtaː]
); the more formal register is sometimes referred to as
زبانِ اُردُوئے معلّٰى
zabān-i Urdū-yi muʿallá
language of the exalted camp
Urdu pronunciation:
[zəbaːn
eː
ʊrdu
eː
moəllaː]
) or
لشکری زبان
lashkari zabān
military language
Urdu pronunciation:
[ləʃkəɾi:
zəbɑ:n]
), referring to the Imperial army
256
or simply
Lashkari
257
The
etymology
of the word used in Urdu, for the most part, decides how polite or refined one's speech is. For example, Urdu speakers distinguish between
پانی
pānī
and
آب
āb
, both meaning
water
. The former is used colloquially and has older
Sanskrit
origins; the latter is used formally and poetically, being of
Persian
origin.
citation needed
If a word is of Persian or Arabic origin, the level of speech is considered to be more formal and grander. Similarly, if Persian or Arabic grammar constructs, such as the
izafat
, are used in Urdu, the level of speech is also considered more formal. If a word is inherited from
Sanskrit
, the level of speech is considered more colloquial and personal.
258
Writing system
Main articles:
Urdu alphabet
and
Urdu braille
Further information:
Hindustani orthography
The
Urdu alphabet
, with transliterations in the Roman and Devanagari scripts
An English-Urdu bilingual sign at the archaeological site of
Sirkap
, near
Taxila
. The Urdu says: (right to left)
دو سَروں والے عقاب کی شبيہ والا مندر
, dō sarōñ wālé u'qāb kī shabīh wāla mandir. "The temple with the image of the eagle with two heads."
Urdu is written right-to left in an extension of the
Persian alphabet
, which is itself an extension of the
Arabic alphabet
. Urdu is associated with the
Nastaʿlīq style
of
Persian calligraphy
, whereas Arabic is generally written in the
Naskh
or
Ruq'ah
styles. Because of its thousands of
ligatures
Nasta’liq
is notoriously difficult to typeset, so Urdu newspapers were hand-written by masters of calligraphy, known as
kātib
or
kh
ush-nawīs
, until the late 1980s. One handwritten Urdu newspaper,
The Musalman
, is still published daily in
Chennai
259
InPage
, a widely used
desktop publishing
tool for Urdu, has over 20,000 ligatures in its Nastaʿliq
computer fonts
A highly Persianised and technical form of Urdu was the
lingua franca
of the law courts of the British administration in Bengal and the North-West Provinces & Oudh. Until the late 19th century, all proceedings and court transactions in this register of Urdu were written officially in the Persian script.
Romanisation
Main articles:
Roman Urdu
and
Urdish
ISO 15919
Romanisation of Urdu is a scholarly transliteration system that accurately represents the pronunciation of Urdu letters using diacritics and special markers for vowels and nasal sounds.
Roman Urdu
is the writing of Urdu in the
Latin script
. It is the prevalent form of Urdu on social media. Pakistanis also frequently write other Pakistani languages in the Latin script online.
The romanised usage of Urdu dates back to 1804 in colonial India, when Romanised Urdu Bibles were published by the
British and Foreign Bible Society
and later, the
Bible Society of India
; these publications continue to be used in parts of
Uttar Pradesh
in present-day India.
260
261
Other scripts used
In 1880,
Sir Ashley Eden
, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal in colonial India abolished the use of the Persian alphabet in the law courts of Bengal and ordered the exclusive use of
Kaithi
, a popular script used for both Urdu and Hindi; in the
Bihar Province
, the court language was Urdu written in the Kaithi script.
262
263
264
265
Kaithi's association with Urdu and Hindi was ultimately eliminated by the political contest between these languages and their scripts, in which the Persian script was definitively linked to Urdu.
266
More recently in India,
when?
Urdu speakers have adopted
Devanagari
for publishing Urdu periodicals and have innovated new strategies to mark Urdu in Devanagari as distinct from Hindi in Devanagari.
267
Such publishers have introduced new orthographic features into Devanagari for the purpose of representing the Perso-Arabic etymology of Urdu words. One example is the use of अ (Devanagari
) with vowel signs to mimic contexts of
‘ain
), in violation of Hindi orthographic rules. For Urdu publishers, the use of Devanagari gives them a greater audience, whereas the orthographic changes help them preserve a distinct identity of Urdu.
268
Some poets from
Bengal
, namely
Qazi Nazrul Islam
, have historically used the
Bengali script
to write Urdu poetry like
Prem Nagar Ka Thikana Karle
and
Mera Beti Ki Khela
, as well as bilingual Bengali-Urdu poems like
Alga Koro Go Khõpar Bãdhon
Juboker Chholona
and
Mera Dil Betab Kiya
269
270
271
Dhakaiya Urdu
is a colloquial non-standard dialect of Urdu which was typically not written. However, organisations seeking to preserve the dialect have begun transcribing the dialect in the
Bengali script
note 3
272
273
See also
Glossary of the British Raj
List of Urdu-language poets
List of Urdu-language writers
Persian and Urdu
Persian language in the Indian subcontinent
States of India by Urdu speakers
Uddin and Begum Hindustani Romanisation
Urdu Digest
Urdu in the United Kingdom
Urdu Informatics
Urdu keyboard
Urdu poetry
Urdu-speaking people
Notes
Urdu has some form of official status in the Indian states of
Andhra Pradesh
Bihar
, Jharkhand,
Telangana
, Uttar Pradesh and
West Bengal
, as well as the national capital territory of Delhi and the
Union Territory
of
Jammu and Kashmir
An example can be seen in the word "need" in Urdu. Urdu uses the
Persian
version ضرورت rather than the original Arabic ضرورة. See:
John T. Platts "A dictionary of Urdu, classical Hindi, and English" (1884) Page 749
Archived
25 February 2021 at the
Wayback Machine
. Urdu and Hindi use Persian pronunciation in their loanwords, rather than that of Arabic– for instance rather than pronouncing ض as the
emphatic consonant
"ḍ", the original sound in
Arabic
, Urdu uses the Persian pronunciation "z". See:
John T. Platts "A dictionary of Urdu, classical Hindi, and English" (1884) Page 748
Archived
14 April 2021 at the
Wayback Machine
Organisations like Dhakaiya Sobbasi Jaban and Dhakaiya Movement, among others, consistently write Dhakaiya Urdu using the Bengali script.
Footnotes
English:
ʊər
uː
OOR
-doo
note 1
10
11
References
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, Turkic, 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
Urdu
at
Ethnologue
(28th ed., 2025)
"Urdu second official language in Andhra Pradesh"
Deccan Chronicles
. 24 March 2022
. Retrieved
25 March
2022
"Bill recognising Urdu as second official language passed"
The Hindu
. 23 March 2022
. Retrieved
1 April
2022
"Urdu is Telangana's second official language"
The Indian Express
. 16 November 2017
. Retrieved
27 February
2018
"Urdu is second official language in Telangana as state passes Bill"
The News Minute
. 17 November 2017
. Retrieved
27 February
2018
"Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 – Chapter 1: Founding Provisions"
. Retrieved
6 December
2014
Pavan (17 June 2022).
"AP govt. issues orders recognising Urdu as the official language"
The Hans India
Archived
from the original on 27 July 2023
. Retrieved
27 July
2023
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
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.
Gazzola, Michele; Wickström, Bengt-Arne (2016).
The Economics of Language Policy
. MIT Press. p. 469.
ISBN
978-0-262-03470-8
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.
Groff, Cynthia (2017).
The Ecology of Language in Multilingual India: Voices of Women and Educators in the Himalayan Foothills
. Palgrave Macmillan UK. p. 58.
ISBN
978-1-137-51961-0
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.
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.
Ahmad, Aijaz (2002).
Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia
. Verso. p. 113.
ISBN
9781859843581
On this there are far more reliable statistics than those on population.
Farhang-e-Asafiya
is by general agreement the most reliable Urdu dictionary. It was compiled in the late nineteenth century by an Indian scholar little exposed to British or Orientalist scholarship. The lexicographer in question, Syed Ahmed Dehlavi, had no desire to sunder Urdu's relationship with Farsi, as is evident even from the title of his dictionary. He estimates that roughly 75 per cent of the total stock of 55,000 Urdu words that he compiled in his dictionary are derived from Sanskrit and Prakrit, and that the entire stock of the base words of the language, without exception, are derived from these sources. What distinguishes Urdu from a great many other Indian languauges ... is that it draws almost a quarter of its vocabulary from language communities to the west of India, such as Farsi, Turkish, and Tajik. Most of the little it takes from Arabic has not come directly but through Farsi.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Dudney, Arthur (2022).
India in the Persian World of Letters: Ḳhān-I Ārzū Among the Eighteenth-Century Philologists
. Oxford Oriental Monographs series. Oxford University Press. p. 48.
ISBN
978-0-19-285741-5
it might in fact be the oldest critical dictionary of
khari boli hindi
, which is to say the vernacular usage of the Ganges-Yamuna plain that yielded both Modern Standard Hindi and Urdu.
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.
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.
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.
"What are the top 200 most spoken languages?"
Ethnologue
. Retrieved
4 March
2026
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
(2):
82–
91.
doi
10.35484/ahss.2022(3-II)08
ISSN
2790-6809
Faruqi, Shamsur Rahman
(2003), Sheldon Pollock (ed.),
A Long History of Urdu Literary Culture Part 1
, Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions From South Asia, University of California Press, p. 806,
ISBN
978-0-520-22821-4
Rahman, Tariq
(2001).
From Hindi to Urdu: A Social and Political History
(PDF)
. Oxford University Press. pp.
1–
22.
ISBN
978-0-19-906313-0
. Archived from
the original
(PDF)
on 10 October 2014
. Retrieved
7 October
2014
"A Historical Perspective of Urdu | National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language"
. 15 October 2022. Archived from
the original
on 15 October 2022
. Retrieved
17 October
2022
Dictionary, Rekhta (5 April 2022).
"Meaning of Urdu"
Rekhta dictionary
. Retrieved
5 April
2022
Clyne, Michael G. (1992).
Pluricentric Languages: Differing Norms in Different Nations
. Walter de Gruyter. p. 383.
ISBN
9783110128550
"Meaning of urdu-e-mualla in English"
Rekhta Dictionary
. Retrieved
17 October
2022
Bhat, M. Ashraf (2017).
The Changing Language Roles and Linguistic Identities of the Kashmiri Speech Community
. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 72.
ISBN
978-1-4438-6260-8
Although it has borrowed a large number of lexical items from Persian and some from Turkish, it is a derivative of
Hindvi
(also called 'early Urdu'), the parent of both modern Hindi and Urdu. It originated as a new, common language of Delhi, which has been called
Hindavi
or
Dahlavi
by Amir Khusrau. After the advent of the Mughals on the stage of Indian history, the
Hindavi
language enjoyed greater space and acceptance. Persian words and phrases came into vogue. The
Hindavi
of that period was known as
Rekhta
, or Hindustani, and only later as Urdu. Perfect amity and tolerance between Hindus and Muslims tended to foster
Rekhta
or Urdu, which represented the principle of unity in diversity, thus marking a feature of Indian life at its best. The ordinary spoken version ('bazaar Urdu') was almost identical to the popularly spoken version of Hindi. Most prominent scholars in India hold the view that Urdu is neither a Muslim nor a Hindu language; it is an outcome of a multicultural and multi-religious encounter.
Dua, Hans R. (1992). Hindi–Urdu is a pluricentric language. In M. G. Clyne (Ed.),
Pluricentric languages: Differing norms in different nations
. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
ISBN
3-11-012855-1
Kachru, Yamuna
(2008), Braj Kachru; Yamuna Kachru; S. N. Sridhar (eds.),
Hindi–Urdu–Hindustani
, Language in South Asia, Cambridge University Press, p. 82,
ISBN
978-0-521-78653-9
, archived from
the original
on 24 January 2020
Qalamdaar, Azad (27 December 2010).
"Hamari History"
. Hamari Boli Foundation. Archived from
the original
on 27 December 2010.
Historically, Hindustani developed in the post-12th century period under the impact of the incoming Afghans and Turks as a linguistic modus vivendi from the sub-regional apabhramshas of north-western India. Its first major folk poet was the great Persian master, Amir Khusrau (1253–1325), who is known to have composed dohas (couplets) and riddles in the newly-formed speech, then called 'Hindavi'. Through the medieval time, this mixed speech was variously called by various speech sub-groups as 'Hindavi', 'Zaban-e-Hind', 'Hindi', 'Zaban-e-Dehli', 'Rekhta', 'Gujarii. 'Dakkhani', 'Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla', 'Zaban-e-Urdu', or just 'Urdu'. By the late 11th century, the name 'Hindustani' was in vogue and had become the lingua franca for most of northern India. A sub-dialect called Khari Boli was spoken in and around the Delhi region at the start of the 13th century when the Delhi Sultanate was established. Khari Boli gradually became the prestige dialect of Hindustani (Hindi–Urdu) and became the basis of modern Standard Hindi & Urdu.
Schmidt, Ruth Laila. "1 Brief history and geography of Urdu 1.1 History and sociocultural position." The Indo-Aryan Languages 3 (2007): 286.
Malik, Shahbaz, Shareef Kunjahi, Mir Tanha Yousafi, Sanawar Chadhar, Alam Lohar, Abid Tamimi, Anwar Masood et al. "Census History of Punjabi Speakers in Pakistan."
"The Learning Republic - highedpk.com"
. 23 August 2025
. Retrieved
28 November
2025
Taher, Mohamed (1994).
Librarianship and Library Science in India: An Outline of Historical Perspectives
. Concept Publishing Company. p. 115.
ISBN
978-81-7022-524-9
Mody, Sujata Sudhakar (2008).
Literature, Language, and Nation Formation: The Story of a Modern Hindi Journal 1900-1920
. University of California, Berkeley. p. 7.
...Hindustani, Rekhta, and Urdu as later names of the old Hindi (a.k.a. Hindavi).
English-Urdu Learner's Dictionary
. Multi Linguis. 6 March 2021.
ISBN
978-1-005-94089-8
** History (Simplified) ** Proto-Indo European > Proto-Indo-Iranian > Proto-Indo-Aryan > Vedic Sanskrit > Classical Sanskrit > Sauraseni Prakrit > Sauraseni Apabhramsa > Old Hindi > Hindustani > Urdu
Kesavan, B. S. (1997).
History Of Printing And Publishing in India
. National Book Trust, India. p. 31.
ISBN
978-81-237-2120-0
It might be useful to recall here that Old Hindi or Hindavi, which was a naturally Persian- mixed language in the largest measure, has played this role before, as we have seen, for five or six centuries.
Sisir Kumar Das
(2005).
History of Indian Literature
Sahitya Akademi
. p. 142.
ISBN
978-81-7201-006-5
The most important trend in the history of Hindi–Urdu is the process of Persianization on the one hand and that of Sanskritization on the other. Amrit Rai offers evidence to show that although the employment of Perso-Arabic script for the language which was akin to Hindi/Hindavi or old Hindi was the first step towards the establishment of the separate identity of Urdu, it was called Hindi for a long time. "The final and complete change-over to the new name took place after the content of the language had undergone a drastic change." He further observes: "In the light of the literature that has come down to us, for about six hundred years, the development of Hindi/Hindavi seems largely to substantiate the view of the basic unity of the two languages. Then, sometime in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the cleavage seems to have begun." Rai quotes from Sadiq, who points out how it became a "systematic policy of poets and scholars" of the eighteenth century to weed out, what they called and thought, "vulgar words." This weeding out meant "the elimination, along with some rough and unmusical plebian words, of a large number of Hindi words for the reason that to the people brought up in Persian traditions they appeared unfamiliar and vulgar." Sadiq concludes: hence the paradox that this crusade against Persian tyranny, instead of bringing Urdu close to the indigenous element, meant in reality a wider gulf between it and the popular speech. But what differentiated Urdu still more from the local dialects was a process of ceaseless importation from Persian. It may seem strange that Urdu writers in rebellion against Persian should decide to draw heavily on Persian vocabulary, idioms, forms, and sentiments. . . . Around 1875 in his word
Urdu Sarf O Nahr
, however, he presented a balanced view pointing out that attempts of the Maulavis to Persianize and of the Pandits to Sanskritize the language were not only an error but against the natural laws of linguistic growth. The common man, he pointed out, used both Persian and Sanskrit words without any qualms;
Taj, Afroz (1997).
"About Hindi–Urdu"
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Archived
from the original on 15 August 2009
. Retrieved
30 June
2019
"Two Languages or One?"
hindiurduflagship.org
Archived
from the original on 11 March 2015
. Retrieved
29 March
2015
Hindi and Urdu developed from the "khari boli" dialect spoken in the Delhi region of northern India.
King, Christopher Rolland (1999).
One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India
Oxford University Press
. p. 67.
ISBN
978-0-19-565112-6
Educated Muslims, for the most part supporters of Urdu, rejected the Hindu linguistic heritage and emphasized the joint Hindu-Muslim origins of Urdu.
Dhulipala, Venkat (2000).
The Politics of Secularism: Medieval Indian Historiography and the Sufis
University of Wisconsin–Madison
. p. 27.
Persian became the court language, and many Persian words crept into popular usage. The composite culture of northern India, known as the Ganga Jamuni tehzeeb was a product of the interaction between Hindu society and Islam.
"Women of the Indian Sub-Continent: Makings of a Culture – Rekhta Foundation"
Google Arts & Culture
. Retrieved
25 February
2020
The "Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb" is one such instance of the composite culture that marks various regions of the country. Prevalent in the North, particularly in the central plains, it is born of the union between the Hindu and Muslim cultures. Most of the temples were lined along the Ganges and the Khanqah (Sufi school of thought) were situated along the Yamuna river (also called Jamuna). Thus, it came to be known as the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, with the word "tehzeeb" meaning culture. More than communal harmony, its most beautiful by-product was "Hindustani" which later gave us the Hindi and Urdu languages.
Jain, Danesh; Cardona, George (2007).
The Indo-Aryan Languages
. Routledge.
ISBN
978-1-135-79711-9
The primary sources of non-IA loans into MSH are Arabic, Persian, Portuguese, Turkic and English. Conversational registers of Hindi/Urdu (not to mentioned formal registers of Urdu) employ large numbers of Persian and Arabic loanwords, although in Sanskritised registers many of these words are replaced by
tatsama
forms from Sanskrit. The Persian and Arabic lexical elements in Hindi result from the effects of centuries of Islamic administrative rule over much of north India in the centuries before the establishment of British rule in India. Although it is conventional to differentiate among Persian and Arabic loan elements into Hindi/Urdu, in practice it is often difficult to separate these strands from one another. The Arabic (and also Turkic) lexemes borrowed into Hindi frequently were mediated through Persian, as a result of which a thorough intertwining of Persian and Arabic elements took place, as manifest by such phenomena as hybrid compounds and compound words. Moreover, although the dominant trajectory of lexical borrowing was from Arabic into Persian, and thence into Hindi/Urdu, examples can be found of words that in origin are actually Persian loanwords into both Arabic and Hindi/Urdu.
Strnad, Jaroslav (2013).
Morphology and Syntax of Old Hindī: Edition and Analysis of One Hundred Kabīr vānī Poems from Rājasthān
Brill Academic Publishers
ISBN
978-90-04-25489-3
Quite different group of nouns occurring with the ending
-a
in the dir. plural consists of words of Arabic or Persian origin borrowed by the Old Hindi with their Persian plural endings.
"Amīr Khosrow – Indian poet"
Encyclopædia Britannica
Jaswant Lal Mehta (1980).
Advanced Study in the History of Medieval India
. Vol. 1. Sterling Publishers Pvt. Ltd. p. 10.
ISBN
9788120706170
Bakshi, Shiri Ram; Mittra, Sangh (2002).
Hazart Nizam-Ud-Din Auliya and Hazrat Khwaja Muinuddin Chisti
. Criterion.
ISBN
9788179380222
"Urdu language"
Encyclopædia Britannica
. 19 June 2023.
Bhattacharya, Vivek Ranjan (1982).
Famous Indian sages: their immortal messages
. Sagar Publications.
Culture and Circulation: Literature in Motion in Early Modern India
. Brill. 2014.
ISBN
9789004264489
Khan, Abdul Rashid (2001).
The All India Muslim Educational Conference: Its Contribution to the Cultural Development of Indian Muslims, 1886–1947
Oxford University Press
. p. 152.
ISBN
978-0-19-579375-8
After the conquest of the Deccan, Urdu received the liberal patronage of the courts of Golconda and Bijapur. Consequently, Urdu borrowed words from the local language of Telugu and Marathi as well as from Sanskrit.
Luniya, Bhanwarlal Nathuram (1978).
Life and Culture in Medieval India
. Kamal Prakashan. p. 311.
Under the liberal patronage of the courts of Golconda and Bijapur, Urdu borrowed words from the local languages like Telugu and Marathi as well as from Sanskrit, but its themes were moulded on Persian models.
Kesavan, Bellary Shamanna (1985).
History of Printing and Publishing in India: Origins of printing and publishing in the Hindi heartland
. National Book Trust. p. 7.
ISBN
978-81-237-2120-0
The Mohammedans of the Deccan thus called their Hindustani tongue Dakhani (Dakhini), Gujari or Bhaka (Bhakha) which was a symbol of their belonging to Muslim conquering and ruling group in the Deccan and South India where overwhelming number of Hindus spoke Marathi, Kannada, Telugu and Tamil.
Rauf Parekh (25 August 2014).
"Literary Notes: Common misconceptions about Urdu"
Dawn
. Pakistan.
Archived
from the original on 25 January 2015
. Retrieved
29 March
2015
Urdu did not get its present name till late 18th Century and before that had had a number of different names – including Hindi, Hindvi, Hindustani, Dehlvi, Lahori, Dakkani, and even Moors – though it was born much earlier.
Mazhar Yusuf (1998).
Sind Quarterly: Volume 26, Issues 1–2
. p. 36.
Malik, Muhammad Kamran, and Syed Mansoor Sarwar. "Named entity recognition system for postpositional languages: urdu as a case study." International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications 7.10 (2016): 141–147.
First Encyclopaedia of Islam: 1913–1936
Brill Academic Publishers
. 1993. p. 1024.
ISBN
9789004097964
Whilst the Muhammadan rulers of India spoke Persian, which enjoyed the prestige of being their court language, the common language of the country continued to be Hindi, derived through Prakrit from Sanskrit. On this dialect of the common people was grafted the Persian language, which brought a new language, Urdu, into existence. Sir George Grierson, in the Linguistic Survey of India, assigns no distinct place to Urdu, but treats it as an offshoot of Western Hindi.
Am.rta Rāya; Amrit Rai; Amr̥tarāya (1984).
A House Divided: The Origin and Development of Hindi/Hindavi
. Oxford University Press. p. 240.
ISBN
978-0-19-561643-9
Alyssa Ayres (23 July 2009).
Speaking Like a State: Language and Nationalism in Pakistan
Cambridge University Press
. p.
19
ISBN
9780521519311
"Urdu's origin: it's not a 'camp language' - Newspaper - DAWN.COM"
. 17 May 2023.
{{
cite web
}}
: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (
link
Language Problem in India
. Institute of Objective Studies. 1997. p. 138.
ISBN
9788185220413
"Urdu Language – Historical Perspective - highedpk.com"
. 28 November 2025
. Retrieved
28 November
2025
sir Richard Francis Burton, Luis Vaz de Camoens (1881).
Camoens: his life and his Lusiads, a commentary: Volume 2
. Oxford University. p. 573.
The "Moor" of Camoens, meaning simply "Moslem", was used by a past generation of Anglo-Indians, who called the Urdu or Hindustani dialect "the Moors"
Henk W. Wagenaar; S. S. Parikh; D. F. Plukker; R. Veldhuijzen van Zanten (1993).
Allied Chambers transliterated Hindi-Hindi-English dictionary
. Allied Publishers.
ISBN
9788186062104
John Ovington (1994).
A Voyage to Surat in the Year 1689
. Asian Educational Services. p. 147.
Zahiruddin Malik (1977).
The Reign Of Muhammad Shah 1919-1748
Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (1969).
Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft:Volume 119
. Kommissionsverlag F. Steiner. p. 267.
Coatsworth, John (2015).
Global Connections: Politics, Exchange, and Social Life in World History
. United States: Cambridge Univ Pr. p. 159.
ISBN
9780521761062
Tariq Rahman
(2011).
"Urdu as the Language of Education in British India"
(PDF)
Pakistan Journal of History and Culture
32
(2). NIHCR:
1–
42.
Delacy, Richard; Ahmed, Shahara (2005).
Hindi, Urdu & Bengali
. Lonely Planet. pp.
11–
12.
Hindi and Urdu are generally considered to be one spoken language with two different literary traditions. That means that Hindi and Urdu speakers who shop in the same markets (and watch the same Bollywood films) have no problems understanding each other – they'd both say yeh
kitne
kaa hay for 'How much is it?' – but the written form for Hindi will be यह कितने का है? and the Urdu one will be یہ کتنے کا ہے؟ Hindi is written from left to right in the Devanagari script, and is the official language of India, along with English. Urdu, on the other hand, is written from right to left in the Nastaliq script (a modified form of the Arabic script) and is the national language of Pakistan. It's also one of the official languages of the Indian states of Bihar and Jammu & Kashmir. Considered as one, these tongues constitute the second most spoken language in the world, sometimes called Hindustani. In their daily lives, Hindi and Urdu speakers communicate in their 'different' languages without major problems. ... Both Hindi and Urdu developed from Classical Sanskrit, which appeared in the Indus Valley (modern Pakistan and northwest India) at about the start of the Common Era. The first old Hindi (or Apabhransha) poetry was written in the year 769 AD, and by the European Middle Ages it became known as 'Hindvi'. Muslim Turks invaded the Punjab in 1027 and took control of Delhi in 1193. They paved the way for the Islamic Mughal Empire, which ruled northern India from the 16th century until it was defeated by the British Raj in the mid-19th century. It was at this time that the language of this book began to take form, a mixture of Hindvi grammar with Arabic, Persian and Turkish vocabulary. The Muslim speakers of Hindvi began to write in the Arabic script, creating Urdu, while the Hindu population incorporated the new words but continued to write in Devanagari script.
Holt, P. M.; Lambton, Ann K. S.; Lewis, Bernard, eds. (1977).
The Cambridge History of Islam
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 723.
ISBN
0-521-29138-0
Jasanoff, Maya (18 December 2007).
Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850
. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
ISBN
978-0-307-42571-3
It was claimed that in Lucknow even everyday Urdu sppeech had been raised to its highest degree of perfection. "The masses and uneducated people" were said to "speak better Urdu than many poets...of other places," and outsiders were too intimidated to open their mouths. In the celebrated salons of Lucknow's noblewomen and courtesans, conversation flowed with such grace "it seemed as though 'flowers were dropping from their lips.'" Lucknow was buzzingly dynamic. In a self-conscious effort to echo the lost glory of Akbar's India, Asaf ud-Daula patronized writers, musicians, artists, craftsmen, and scholars on an imperial scale. Leading Urdu poets such as Mir Taqi Mir fled the crumbling Mughal capital and came to Lucknow instead, where they developed a distinctive style and school of poetry. Modern Urdu prose literature originated in Lucknow, and Persian, the language of status and learning, flourished. As a seat of Shiite scholarship, Lucknow rivaled the religious centers of Iran and eastern Iraq.
"Not Just Urdu, But Lakhnawi Urdu"
Tornos
(6). 2014.
Urdu and that too Luckhnawi Urdu is a natural part of day to day conversation of the people of Lucknow, irrespective of their mother-tongue or their religion. A devout Hindu too in Lucknow would use this dialect without any in-habitations, while the grace and style of Urdu in Lucknow comes quite naturally to him as it would to a person of Muslim faith, all by virtue of being born and lived in Lucknow. Language of Lucknow was by all means superior to the languages of Delhi and Hyderabad that were other two seats of refinement, grace and style. Mirza Ghalib of Delhi could not resist the charm of Lucknow's language and in spite of his refinements in language did accept being inferior to the refined dialect of Lucknow. After all what makes Lucknow's language so very different? Difference between the Mughal culture and Awadhi culture lies in the fact that the royal dialect of the courts of Awadh came on the streets and in the lanes to evolve and flourish among the common subjects in Lucknow, while Mughal courts were like all other royal courts that had a difference in the culture and language of the courts and the common subjects.
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Clyne, Michael (24 May 2012).
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Mody, Sujata S. (2018).
The Making of Modern Hindi: Literary Authority in Colonial North India
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From the mid-1860s onwards, advocates for Khari Boli Hindi, current in and around Delhi and written in the Devanagari script, had vied for equal recognition with the officially recognized Urdu.
Mody, Sujata S. (2018).
The Making of Modern Hindi: Literary Authority in Colonian North India
. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. pp.
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Advocates of Hindi over Urdu as official language had also to contend internally with multiple regional languages such as Awadhi, Braj Bhasha, Bhojpuri, Bundeli, and Maithili, among others, all included within the rubric of a premodern Hindi, but which would complicate discussions of an official, modern standard Hindi.
Cort, John E.
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(page 24) I start by contrasting two Digambar Jain authors at the early-modern/modern transition: Parasdas Nigotya (fl. 1838–74, d. 1879) of Jaipur and Nathuram Premi (1881–1960) of Bombay ... (page=28) Premi started out writing in Brajbhasa; but that he also wrote verse in Urdu indicates that he located himself in a linguistically wider and more cosmopolitan literary milieu. Premi soon abandoned the older languages and committed himself to writing and propagating Khari Boli Hindi, which in his lifetime became Modern Standard Hindi.
Cort, John E.
(2024). "When Is the 'Early Modern'?: North Indian Digambar Jain Literary Culture". In Bangha, Imre; Stasik, Danuta (eds.).
Literary Cultures in Early Modern North India: Current Research
. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. pp.
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62, 24, 50.
ISBN
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(page 24) I start by contrasting two Digambar Jain authors at the early-modern/modern transition: Parasdas Nigotya (fl. 1838–74, d. 1879) of Jaipur and Nathuram Premi (1881–1960) of Bombay ... (page 50) Parasdas reminds us that language use in early modern north India involved complex interactions between more localized written, spoken, and sung language usage and transregional usage of languages such as Sanskrit, Prakrit, Apabhramsha, Maru-Gurjar, Brajbhasa, and Urdu. Premi's pronounced break with both Brajbhasa and Urdu in favour of the newly developing trensgressional prestige language of Modern Standard Hindi involved a conscious choice of language
Mani, Preetha (2022).
The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method
. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
ISBN
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In the North, the recognition in 1900 of Devanagari alongside Nastaliq as an official script of the court constituted a pivotal moment in the development of Hindi nationalism.
Mani, Preetha (2022).
The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method
. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
ISBN
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Yet, no sense of Hindi as a standardized language distinct from Urdu existed even in the 1910s.
Goulding, Gregory (2024). "Urban Space Across Genre: The Cities of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh". In Anjaria, Ulka; Nerlekar, Anjali (eds.).
The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures
. New York: Oxford University Press. pp.
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545, 533.
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Before and after independence, many of the most important ideas of urban culture in northern India, such as the literary traditions of Lucknow and Delhi, were strongly associated with Urdu; Hindi, by contrast, was at times portrayed as an uncouth, undeveloped language. In response to this, from the 1910s onward, Hindi was rigorously policed to produce a standard, Sanskritic language that did not allow for the influence of Urdu or of the many languages, now considered dialects, that were spoken in the regions of northern India.
Mani, Preetha (2022).
The Idea of Indian Literature: Gender, Genre, and Comparative Method
. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
ISBN
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Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi's editorship of the Hindi journal
Saraswati
from 1903 to 1920—through which Dwivedi carefully crafted the spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, and genres now associated with
Khari Boli
(equated today with modern standard Hindi)—provided an avenue for expressions of Hindi language to emerge.
"Role of Urdu Language in Pakistan Movement: A Historical Review"
MUSLIM PERSPECTIVES
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THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE
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One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India
Oxford University Press
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British language policy both resulted from and contributed to the larger political processes which eventually led to the partition of British India into India and Pakistan, an outcome almost exactly paralleled by the linguistic partition of the Hindi–Urdu continuum into highly Sanskritized Hindi and highly Persianized Urdu.
Ahmad, Aijazuddin (2009).
Geography of the South Asian Subcontinent: A Critical Approach
. Concept Publishing Company. p. 119.
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Tariq, Rahman.
Urdu in Hyderabad State
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Modern Asian Studies
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Urdu-speaking Muhajirs accounted for 3.5% of united Pakistan's population in the 1960s but they occupied 21% of the positions in the civil services that helped them shape the country in its infancy including through the adoption of their mother tongue as the national language
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In the 1980s and '90s, at least three million Afghans—mostly Pashtun—fled to Pakistan, where a substantial number spent several years being exposed to Hindi language media, especially Bollywood films and songs, and being educated in Urdu-language schools, both of which contributed to the decline of Dari, even among urban Pashtuns.
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Most Afghans in Kabul understand and/or speak Hindi, thanks to the popularity of Indian cinema in the country.
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Desexualizing campaigns dovetailed with the attempt to purge Urdu of Sanskrit and Prakrit words at the same time as Hindi literateurs tried to purge Hindi of Persian and Arabic words. The late-nineteenth century politics of Urdu and Hindi, later exacerbated by those of India and Pakistan, had the unfortunate result of certain poets being excised from the canon.
Zecchini, Laetitia (31 July 2014).
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Kachru, Braj (2015).
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The style of Urdu, even in Pakistan, is changing from "high" Urdu to colloquial Urdu (more like Hindustani, which would have pleased M.K. Gandhi).
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The everyday speech of well over 50,000,000 persons of all communities in the north of India and in West Pakistan is the expression of a common language, Hindustani.
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It is generally admitted that Urdu is a dying language. What is not generally admitted is that it is a dying National language. What used to be called Hindustani, the spoken language of the largest number of Indians, contains more elements of Urdu than Sanskrit academics tolerate, but it is still the language of the people.
"Urdu Is Alive and Moving Ahead With Times: Gulzar"
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Phrases like 'dying language' are often used to describe the condition of Urdu in India and indicators like 'the number of Urdu-medium schools' present a litany of bad news with respect to the present conditions and future of the language.
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Arvind Kala is not much off the mark when he says 'Urdu is a dying language (in India), but it is Hindi movie dialogues which have heightened appreciation of Urdu in India. Thanks to Hindi films, knowledge of Urdu is seen as a sign of sophistication among the cognoscent of the North.'
Singh, Khushwant (2011).
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The third force leading to the divergence between Hindi and Urdu was the parallel and associated development of Hindu and Muslim revivalisms and communal antagonism, which had the consequence for the Hindi–Urdu conflict of reinforcing the tendency to identify Urdu as the language of Muslims and Hindi as the language of Hindus. Although objectively this is not entirely true even today, it is undeniable historical tendency has been in this direction. (...) Many Hindus also continue to write in Urdu, both in literature and in the mass media. However, Hindu writers in Urdu are a dying generation and Hindi and Urdu have increasingly become subjectively separate languages identified with different religious communities.
Everaert, Christine (2010).
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There have been and are many great Hindu poets who wrote in Urdu. And they learned Hinduism by readings its religious texts in Urdu. Gulzar Dehlvi—who nonliterary name is Anand Mohan Zutshi (b. 1926)—is one among many examples.
S.H, Patil (2016).
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Historically, Urdu developed from the sub-regional language of the Delhi area, which became a literary language in the eighteenth century. Two quite similar standard forms of the language developed in Delhi, and in Lucknow in modern Uttar Pradesh. Since 1947, a third form, Karachi standard Urdu, has evolved.
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Claire Alexander; Joya Chatterji; Annu Jalais (6 November 2015).
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English has been the main language of instruction at the elementary and secondary levels since colonial times. It remains the predominant language of instruction in private schools but has been increasingly replaced with Urdu in public schools. Punjab province, for example, recently announced that it will begin to use Urdu as the exclusive medium of instruction in schools beginning in 2020. Depending on the location and predominantly in rural areas, regional languages are used as well, particularly in elementary education. The language of instruction in higher education is mostly English, but some programs and institutions teach in Urdu.
Robina Kausar; Muhammad Sarwar; Muhammad Shabbir (eds.).
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In the
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Modern Urdu is a fairly homogenous language. An older southern form, Deccani Urdu, is now obsolete. Two varieties however, must be mentioned viz. the Urdu of Delhi, and the Urdu of Lucknow. Both are almost identical, differing only in some minor points. Both of these varieties are considered 'Standard Urdu' with some minor divergences.
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Two forms of the same language, Nagarai Hindi and Persianized Hindi (Urdu) had identical grammar, shared common words and roots, and employed different scripts.
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978-1-61530-149-2
Urdu is closely related to Hindi, a language that originated and developed in the Indian subcontinent. They share the same Indic base and are so similar in phonology and grammar that they appear to be one language.
"Bringing Order to Linguistic Diversity: Language Planning in the British Raj"
. Language in India. Archived from
the original
on 26 May 2008
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"A Brief Hindi – Urdu FAQ"
. sikmirza. Archived from
the original
on 2 December 2007
. Retrieved
20 May
2008
"Hindi/Urdu Language Instruction"
. University of California, Davis. Archived from
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on 3 January 2015
. Retrieved
3 January
2015
Hindi
at
Ethnologue
(25th ed., 2022)
"Urdu and its Contribution to Secular Values"
. South Asian Voice. Archived from
the original
on 11 November 2007
. Retrieved
26 February
2008
"Some notes on Hindi and Urdu",
The Annual of Urdu studies
, number 11, 1996, pp. 203–208.
Shakespear, John (1834),
A dictionary, Hindustani and English
, Black, Kingsbury, Parbury and Allen,
archived
from the original on 28 July 2017
Fallon, S. W. (1879),
A new Hindustani-English dictionary, with illustrations from Hindustani literature and folk-lore
, Banāras: Printed at the Medical Hall Press,
archived
from the original on 11 October 2014
Shapiro, Michael C.; Schiffman, Harold F. (2019).
Language and Society in South Asia
. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. p. 53.
ISBN
978-3-11-085763-4
Clyne, Michael (24 May 2012).
Pluricentric Languages: Differing Norms in Different Nations
. Walter de Gruyter. p. 391.
ISBN
978-3-11-088814-0
"A Brief Hindi – Urdu FAQ"
. sikmirza. Archived from
the original
on 2 December 2007
. Retrieved
20 May
2008
Hoernle, August Friedrich Rudolf (1880).
A Grammar of the Eastern Hindi Compared with the Other Gaudian Languages: Accompanied by a Language-map and Table of Alphabets
. Trübner. pp. vii.
Hence Urdu and High-Hindi are really the same language; they have an identical grammar and differ merely in the vocabulary, the former using as many foreign words, the latter as few as possible.
"India – The World Factbook"
. Central Intelligence Agency. Archived from
the original
on 11 June 2008
. Retrieved
22 October
2019
"Urdu"
Ethnologue Free
. Retrieved
19 March
2023
"Population by mother tongue, sex and rural/urban, Census-2023"
(PDF)
pbs.gov.pk
"Middle East :: Saudi Arabia – The World Factbook"
. Central Intelligence Agency. Archived from
the original
on 8 January 2019
. Retrieved
1 November
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"South Asia :: Nepal – The World Factbook"
. Central Intelligence Agency. Archived from
the original
on 26 December 2018
. Retrieved
22 October
2019
National Statistics Office (2021).
National Population and Housing Census 2021, Caste/Ethnicity Report
Government of Nepal
(Report).
"Afghanistan"
Ethnologue Free
. Retrieved
19 March
2023
"South Asia :: Bangladesh – The World Factbook"
. Central Intelligence Agency. Archived from
the original
on 29 December 2017
. Retrieved
3 November
2019
"Bangladesh: Urdu-Speaking 'Biharis' Seek Recognition, Respect and Rights"
International Republican Institute
. 4 February 2021. Archived from
the original
on 26 September 2022
. Retrieved
26 September
2022
"Europe :: United Kingdom – The World Factbook"
. Central Intelligence Agency. Archived from
the original
on 7 January 2019
. Retrieved
1 November
2019
"North America :: United States – The World Factbook"
. Central Intelligence Agency. Archived from
the original
on 26 December 2018
. Retrieved
1 November
2019
"Detailed Languages Spoken at Home and Ability to Speak English for the Population 5 Years and Over for United States: 2009–2013"
"North America :: Canada – The World Factbook"
. Central Intelligence Agency. Archived from
the original
on 24 December 2018
. Retrieved
1 November
2019
"Linguistic diversity and multilingualism in Canadian homes"
Statistics Canada
. 2 August 2017.
'Where we live, what we do' – Explore Urdu community by interactive tool"
SBS Language
. 12 July 2022
. Retrieved
22 September
2023
"Census of Population 2016 – Profile 7 Migration and Diversity: Demographics"
Central Statistics Office
. Retrieved
22 September
2023
"Urdu Phonetic Inventory"
(PDF)
Center for Language Engineering
. Retrieved
7 August
2020
Saleem, Abdul M., et al. (2002).
Urdu consonantal and vocalic sounds
. Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing
Kachru (2006
:20)
Masica (1991
:110)
Ohala (1999
:102)
"Farhang-e-Asifiya"
[فرہنگِ آصفیہ].
Urdu Gah
Dalmia, Vasudha (31 July 2017).
Hindu Pasts: Women, Religion, Histories
SUNY Press
. p. 310.
ISBN
9781438468075
On the issue of vocabulary, Ahmad goes on to cite Syed Ahmad Dehlavi as he set about to compile the Farhang-e-Asafiya, an Urdu dictionary, in the late nineteenth century. Syed Ahmad 'had no desire to sunder Urdu's relationship with Farsi, as is evident from the title of his dictionary. He estimates that roughly 75 percent of the total stock of 55.000 Urdu words that he compiled in his dictionary are derived from Sanskrit and Prakrit, and that the entire stock of the base words of the language, without exception, are from these sources' (2000: 112–13). As Ahmad points out, Syed Ahmad, as a member of Delhi's aristocratic elite, had a clear bias towards Persian and Arabic. His estimate of the percentage of Prakitic words in Urdu should therefore be considered more conservative than not. The actual proportion of Prakitic words in everyday language would clearly be much higher.
Taj, Afroz (1997).
"About Hindi–Urdu"
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Archived
from the original on 15 August 2009
. Retrieved
27 March
2018
"Urdu's origin: it's not a "camp language"
Dawn
. Pakistan. 17 December 2011.
Archived
from the original on 24 September 2015
. Retrieved
5 July
2015
Urdu nouns and adjective can have a variety of origins, such as Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Pushtu and even Portuguese, but ninety-nine per cent of Urdu verbs have their roots in Sanskrit/Prakrit. So it is an Indo-Aryan language which is a branch of Indo-Iranian family, which in turn is a branch of Indo-European family of languages. According to Dr Gian Chand Jain, Indo-Aryan languages had three phases of evolution beginning around 1,500 BC and passing through the stages of Vedic Sanskrit, classical Sanskrit and Pali. They developed into Prakrit and Apbhransh, which served as the basis for the formation of later local dialects.
India Perspectives, Volume 8
. PTI for the Ministry of External Affairs. 1995. p. 23.
All verbs in Urdu are of Sanskrit origin. According to lexicographers, only about 25 percent words in Urdu diction have Persian or Arabic origin.
Versteegh, Kees; Versteegh, C. H. M. (1997).
The Arabic Language
. Columbia University Press.
ISBN
9780231111522
... of the Qufdn; many Arabic loanwords in the indigenous languages, as in Urdu and Indonesian, were introduced mainly through the medium of Persian.
Khan, Iqtidar Husain (1989).
Studies in Contrastive Analysis
The Department of Linguistics of Aligarh Muslim University
. p. 5.
It is estimated that almost 25% of the Urdu vocabulary consists of words which are of Persian and Arabic origin.
American Universities Field Staff (1966).
Reports Service: South Asia series
. American Universities Field Staff. p. 43.
The Urdu vocabulary is about 30% Persian.
Naim, C. M.
(1999),
"Ambiguities of Heritage: Fictions and Polemics"
City Press
, South Africa, p. 87,
ISBN
978-969-8380-19-9
{{
citation
}}
: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (
link
Das, Sisir Kumar (2005).
History of Indian Literature: 1911–1956, struggle for freedom : triumph and tragedy
. Sahitya Akademi.
ISBN
9788172017989
Professor Gopi Chand Narang points out that the trends towards Persianization in Urdu is not a new phenomenon. It started with the Delhi school of poets in the eighteenth century in the name of standardization (
meyar-bandi
). It further tilted towards Arabo-Persian influences, writes Narang, with the rise of Iqbal. 'The diction of Faiz Ahmad Faiz who came into prominence after the death of Iqbal is also marked by Persianization; so it is the diction of N.M. Rashid, who popularised free verse in Urdu poetry. Rashid's language is clearly marked by fresh Iranian influences as compared to another trend-setter, Meeraji. Meeraji is on the other extreme because he used Hindized Urdu.'
Shackle, C. (1 January 1990).
Hindi and Urdu Since 1800: A Common Reader
. Heritage Publishers.
ISBN
9788170261629
Kaye, Alan S. (30 June 1997).
Phonologies of Asia and Africa: (including the Caucasus)
. Eisenbrauns.
ISBN
9781575060194
Patel, Aakar (6 January 2013).
"Kids have it right: boundaries of Urdu and Hindi are blurred"
Firstpost
. Retrieved
9 November
2019
Gangan, Surendra (30 November 2011).
"In Pakistan, Hindi flows smoothly into Urdu"
DNA India
. Retrieved
9 November
2019
That Bollywood and Hindi television daily soaps are a hit in Pakistan is no news. So, it's hardly surprising that the Urdu-speaking population picks up and uses Hindi, even the tapori lingo, in its everyday interaction. "The trend became popular a few years ago after Hindi films were officially allowed to be released in Pakistan," said Rafia Taj, head of the mass communication department, University of Karachi. "I don't think it's a threat to our language, as it is bound to happen in the globalisation era. It is anytime better than the attack of western slangs on our language," she added.
Clyne, Michael (24 May 2012).
Pluricentric Languages: Differing Norms in Different Nations
. Walter de Gruyter.
ISBN
978-3-11-088814-0
Jain, Danesh; Cardona, George (26 July 2007).
The Indo-Aryan Languages
. Routledge. p. 294.
ISBN
978-1-135-79711-9
Paul Teyssier: História da Língua Portuguesa
, S. 94. Lisbon 1987
Peter Austin (1 September 2008).
One thousand languages: living, endangered, and lost
. University of California Press. pp. 120–.
ISBN
978-0-520-25560-9
Archived
from the original on 9 May 2013
. Retrieved
29 December
2011
InpaperMagazine (13 November 2011).
"Language: Urdu and the borrowed words"
Dawn
. Pakistan.
Archived
from the original on 2 July 2015
. Retrieved
29 March
2015
John R. Perry, "Lexical Areas and Semantic Fields of Arabic" in Éva Ágnes Csató, Eva Agnes Csato, Bo Isaksson, Carina Jahani,
Linguistic convergence and areal diffusion: case studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic
, Routledge, 2005. pg 97: "It is generally understood that the bulk of the Arabic vocabulary in the central, contiguous Iranian, Turkic and Indic languages was originally borrowed into literary Persian between the ninth and thirteenth centuries"
María Isabel Maldonado García; Mustafa Yapici (2014).
"Common Vocabulary in Urdu and Turkish Language: A Case of Historical Onomasiology"
(PDF)
Journal of Pakistan Vision
15
(1):
193–
122. Archived from
the original
(PDF)
on 27 September 2015.
Colin P. Masica, The Indo-Aryan languages. Cambridge Language Surveys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 466,
Aijazuddin Ahmad (2009).
Geography of the South Asian Subcontinent: A Critical Approach
. Concept Publishing Company. pp. 120–.
ISBN
978-81-8069-568-1
The very word Urdu came into being as the original
Lashkari
dialect, in other words, the language of the army.
"About Urdu"
. Afroz Taj (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
Archived
from the original on 15 August 2009
. Retrieved
26 February
2008
India: The Last Handwritten Newspaper in the World · Global Voices
Archived
1 October 2015 at the
Wayback Machine
. Globalvoices.org (26 March 2012). Retrieved 12 July 2013.
Hooper, John Stirling Morley (1963).
Bible Translation in India, Pakistan and Ceylon
. Oxford University Press. p. 53.
... Roman Urdu Bible, although it still persists in some measure in the churches round Allahabad. A Roman Catholic version of the New Testament in Roman characters, known as the Hartmann Version, was issued at Patna in 1864.
Sharda, Shailvee (22 November 2015).
"When story of Jesus was penned in Roman Urdu"
The Times of India
. Retrieved
25 July
2025
Pandey, Anshuman (13 December 2007).
"Proposal to Encode the Kaithi Script in ISO/IEC 10646"
(PDF)
Unicode
. Retrieved
16 October
2020
Kaithi was used for writing Urdu in the law courts of Bihar when it replaced Perso-Arabic as the official script during the 1880s. The majority of extant legal documents from Bihar from the British period are in Urdu written in Kaithi. There is a substantial number of such manuscripts, specimens of which are given in Figure 21, Figure 22, and Figure 23.
King, Christopher Rolland (1999).
One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India
Oxford University Press
. p. 67.
ISBN
978-0-19-565112-6
Ashraf, Ali (1982).
The Muslim Elite
. Atlantic Publishers & Distributors. p. 80.
The court language however was Urdu in 'Kaithi' script in spite of the use of English as the official language.
Varma, K. K.; Lal, Manohar (1997).
Social Realities in Bihar
. Novelty & Company. p. 347.
The language of learning and administration in Bihar before the East India Company was Persian, and later it was replaced by English. The court language, however, continued to be Urdu written in Kaithi script.
ghose, sagarika.
"Urdu Bharti: नौकरी के लिए भटक रहे हैं 4 हजार उर्दू शिक्षक, कोर्ट कोर्ट खेल रही है सरकार."
Navbharat Times
(in Hindi)
. Retrieved
13 September
2020
Ahmad, Rizwan (2011).
"Urdu in Devanagari: Shifting orthographic practices and Muslim identity in Delhi"
Language in Society
40
(3):
259–
284.
doi
10.1017/S0047404511000182
ISSN
0047-4045
JSTOR
23011824
Ahmad, Rizwan (2011).
"Urdu in Devanagari: Shifting orthographic practices and Muslim identity in Delhi"
Language in Society
40
(3). Cambridge University Press:
259–
284.
doi
10.1017/S0047404511000182
hdl
10576/10736
JSTOR
23011824
S2CID
55975387
"বিদ্রোহী কবি নজরুল; একটি বুলেট কিংবা কবিতার উপাখ্যান"
(in Bengali). 1 June 2014. Archived from
the original
on 26 March 2023
. Retrieved
9 October
2021
Islam, Rafiqul (1969).
নজরুল নির্দেশিকা
(in Bengali).
Khan, Azahar Uddin (1956).
বাংলা সাহিত্যে নজরুল
Nazrul in Bengali literature
] (in Bengali).
Muhammad Shahabuddin Sabu; Nazir Uddin, eds. (2021).
বাংলা-ঢাকাইয়া সোব্বাসী ডিক্সেনারি (বাংলা – ঢাকাইয়া সোব্বাসী অভিধান)
(in Bengali).
Bangla Bazar
, Dhaka: Takiya Mohammad Publications.
"বাংলা-ঢাকাইয়া সোব্বাসী অভিধানের মোড়ক উন্মোচন"
[Unveiling of 'Bangla-Dhakaiya Sobbasi' Dictionary].
Samakal
(in Bengali). 17 January 2021. Archived from
the original
on 14 April 2021
. Retrieved
14 February
2021
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Kachru, Yamuna
(2006).
Hindi
. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing.
ISBN
90-272-3812-X
OCLC
233649033
Masica, Colin
(1991).
The Indo-Aryan Languages
. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ISBN
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OCLC
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Ohala, Manjari (1999).
"Hindi"
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. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp.
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Further reading
Alam, Muzaffar (May 1998). "The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Mughal Politics".
Modern Asian Studies
32
(2):
317–
349.
doi
10.1017/S0026749X98002947
S2CID
146630389
Asher, R. E., ed. (1994).
The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics
. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
ISBN
0-08-035943-4
Azad, Muhammad Husain (2001) [1907].
Aab-e hayat
(in Urdu). Lahore: Naval Kishor Gais Printing Works.
Azad, Muhammad Husain (2001) [1907].
Aab-e hayat
. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Azim, Anwar (1975). "Urdu a victim of cultural genocide". In Imam, Z. (ed.).
Muslims in India
. p. 259.
The Comparative study of Urdu and Khowar
. Badshah Munir Bukhari National Language Authority Pakistan 2003.
Blochmann, Henry
(1877).
English and Urdu dictionary, romanised
(8th ed.). Calcutta: Printed at the Baptist mission press for the Calcutta school-book society. p. 215
. Retrieved
6 July
2011
Bhatia, Tej K. 1996.
Colloquial Hindi: The Complete Course for Beginners
. London, UK & New York, NY: Routledge.
ISBN
0-415-11087-4
(Book), 0415110882 (Cassettes), 0415110890 (Book & Cassette Course)
Bhatia, Tej K. and Koul Ashok. 2000. "Colloquial Urdu: The Complete Course for Beginners." London: Routledge.
ISBN
0-415-13540-0
(Book);
ISBN
0-415-13541-9
(cassette);
ISBN
0-415-13542-7
(book and casseettes course)
Chatterji, Suniti K. (1960).
Indo-Aryan and Hindi
(revised 2nd ed.). Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay.
Dowson, John (1872).
A grammar of the Urdū or Hindūstānī language
(1st ed.). London: Trübner & Co. p. 264
. Retrieved
6 July
2011
Dowson, John (1908).
A grammar of the Urdū or Hindūstānī language
(3rd ed.). London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. p. 264
. Retrieved
6 July
2011
Dua, Hans R. (1992). "Hindi–Urdu as a pluricentric language". In Clyne, M. G. (ed.).
Pluricentric languages: Differing norms in different nations
. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
ISBN
3-11-012855-1
Dua, Hans R. 1994a. Hindustani. In Asher, 1994; pp. 1554.
Dua, Hans R. 1994b. Urdu. In Asher, 1994; pp. 4863–4864.
Durrani, Attash, 2008.
Pakistani Urdu
.Islamabad: National Language Authority, Pakistan.
Gumperz, John J. (1982).
Discourse Strategies
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
. Retrieved
24 March
2022
Hassan, Nazir and Omkar N. Koul 1980.
Urdu Phonetic Reader
. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages.
Jamil, Syed Maqsud (16 June 2006).
"The Literary Heritage of Urdu"
Daily Star
Kelkar, A. R. 1968.
Studies in Hindi–Urdu: Introduction and word phonology
. Poona: Deccan College.
Khan, M. H. 1969. Urdu. In T. A. Sebeok (Ed.),
Current trends in linguistics
(Vol. 5). The Hague: Mouton.
King, Christopher R. (1994).
One Language, Two Scripts: The Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India
. Bombay: Oxford University Press.
King, Robert D. (2001).
"The poisonous potency of script: Hindi and Urdu"
(PDF)
International Journal of the Sociology of Language
(150):
43–
59.
doi
10.1515/ijsl.2001.035
Koul, Ashok K. (2008).
Urdu Script and Vocabulary
. Delhi: Indian Institute of Language Studies.
Koul, Omkar N. (1994).
Hindi Phonetic Reader
. Delhi: Indian Institute of Language Studies.
Koul, Omkar N. (2008).
Modern Hindi Grammar
(PDF)
. Springfield: Dunwoody Press. Archived from
the original
(PDF)
on 28 August 2017
. Retrieved
23 November
2019
Lieven, Anatol (2011).
Pakistan: a hard country
(1st ed.). New York: PublicAffairs.
ISBN
978-1-61039-021-7
OCLC
710995260
Mukherjee, Ramkrishna (2018). Understanding Social Dynamics in South Asia: Essays in Memory of Ramkrishna Mukherjee. Springer. pp. 221–.
ISBN
9789811303876
Narang, G. C.; Becker, D. A. (1971). "Aspiration and nasalization in the generative phonology of Hindi–Urdu".
Language
47
(3):
646–
767.
doi
10.2307/412381
JSTOR
412381
Ohala, M. (1972).
Topics in Hindi–Urdu phonology
(PhD dissertation). Los Angeles: University of California.
Phukan, Shantanu (2000). "The Rustic Beloved: Ecology of Hindi in a Persianate World".
The Annual of Urdu Studies
15
(5):
1–
30.
hdl
1793/18139
Platts, John Thompson (1874).
A grammar of the Hindūstānī or Urdū language
. London: W.H. Allen. p. 399
. Retrieved
6 July
2011
Platts, John Thompson (1892).
A grammar of the Hindūstānī or Urdū language
. London: W.H. Allen. p. 399
. Retrieved
6 July
2011
Platts, John Thompson (1884).
A dictionary of Urdū, classical Hindī, and English
(reprint ed.). London: H. Milford. p. 1259
. Retrieved
6 July
2011
"A Desertful of Roses"
, a site about Ghalib's Urdu ghazals by Frances W. Pritchett, Professor of Modern Indic Languages at Columbia University, New York, NY, US.
Rai, Amrit (1984).
A house divided: The origin and development of Hindi-Hindustani
. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
ISBN
0-19-561643-X
Economic and Political Weekly
. Sameeksha Trust. 1996.
Snell, Rupert, and Simon Weightman (1993).
Teach Yourself Hindi: A Complete Guide for Beginners
. Audiobook on cassette plus book. Lincolnwood, IL: NTC Publishing Group.
ISBN
9780844238630
OCLC
28654267
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Major
unofficial
languages
Over 1 million
speakers
Awadhi
Bagheli
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Garhwali
Gondi
Harauti
Haryanvi
Kangri
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Nimadi
Rajasthani
Surjapuri
Tulu
Wagdi
Varhadi
100,000 – 1 million
speakers
Adi
Angami
Ao
Badaga
Dimasa
Halbi
Karbi
Khotta
Kodava
Kolami
Konyak
Korku
Koya
Kui
Kuvi
Ladakhi
Lotha
Malto
Mising
Nishi
Phom
Rabha
Sema
Sora
Tangkhul
Thadou
Linguistic history
Classical
Multilingualism
Endangered
Scheduled languages in states
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Nepal portal
Indigenous
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Sino-Tibetan
Kiranti
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Chamling
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Limbu
Sampang
Sunwar
Thulung
Vayu
Waling
Yakkha
Magaric
Bhujel
Chepang
Dura
Kham
Magar
Tamangic
Chantyal
Gurung
Manang
Tamang
Tibetic
Jirel
Kagate
Kyirong
Lepcha
Mugomt
Naapa
Nubri
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Yolmo
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Kaike
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Tswa–Ronga
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(Xitsonga)
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(Tshivenḓa)
North West European Sign Language
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mentioned in the
1996 constitution
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Bhaca
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Odia
Odia
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Desia
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Reli
Kupia
Halbic
Halbi
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Nahari
Southern
Marathi–
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Varhadi
Andh
Berar Deccan
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Epigraphical Hybrid Sanskrit
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Monumental Prakrit
Paishachi
Late (
Apabhraṃśa
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Apabhraṃśa
Elu
Kamarupi
Khasa Prakrit
Proto-
languages
Proto-Indo-Iranian
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Early Romani
Unclassified
Badeshi
(unknown further classification)
Bazigar
Chinali–Lahul
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Lahul Lohar
Sheikhgal
Pidgins
and creoles
Andaman Creole Hindi
Bombay Hindi
Haflong Hindi
Kurbet
Nagamese
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Vedda
See also
Indo-Iranian languages
Nuristani languages
Iranian languages
Authority control databases
International
GND
National
United States
France
BnF data
Czech Republic
Spain
Israel
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