Spoken in:	Pakistan, India, AfghanistanÂ
Region:	South Asia,Some concentrated parts of Europe
Total speakers:	61-80 million native, 160 million totalÂ
Ranking:	19–21 (native speakers), in a near tie with Italian and Turkish
Language family:	Indo-European  Indo-Iranian   Indo-Aryan    Central zone     Western Hindi      Hindustani      Â
Writing system:	Urdu alphabet (Nasta’liq script) (Roman Urdu Alphabet)  Language codes ISO 639-1: ur ISO 639-2: urd ISO 639-3: urd Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

Speakers and geographic distribution

 

The phrase Zaban-e Urdu-e Mualla written in Nasta’liq.

There are between 60 and 80 million native speakers of standard Urdū (Khari Boli). Overall, besides the more than 160 million who speak Urdū in Pakistan, there is a considerable Indian population who communicate in Urdū every day. According to the SIL ethnologue (1999 data), Hindi/Urdu is the fifth most spoken language in the world. According to Comerie (1998 data), Hindi-Urdu is the second most spoken language in the world, with 330 million native speakers, after Mandarin and possibly English.

Because of UrdÅ«’s similarity to Hindi, speakers of the two languages can usually understand one another, if both sides refrain from using specialized vocabulary. Indeed, linguists sometimes count them as being part of the same language diasystem. However, UrdÅ« and Hindi are socio-politically different, and people who self-describe as being speakers of Hindi would question their being counted as native speakers of UrdÅ«, and vice-versa.

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

In India, Urdū is spoken in places where there are large Muslim majorities or cities which were bases for Muslim Empires in the past. These include parts of Uttar Pradesh (namely Lucknow), Delhi, Bhopal, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Mysore. Some Indian schools teach Urdū as a first language and have their own syllabus and exams. Indian madrasahs also teach Arabic as well as Urdū. India has more than 2,900 daily Urdū newspapers. Newspapers such as Daily Salar, Daily Pasban, Siasat Daily, Munsif Daily and Inqilab are published and distributed in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.

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

Countries with large numbers of native Urdū speakers:

India (48.1 million [1997]) Pakistan (10.7 million [1993]) Bangladesh (650,000) United Arab Emirates (600,000) United Kingdom (400,000 [1990]) Saudi Arabia (382,000) Nepal (375,000) United States (350,000) South Africa (170,000 South Asian Muslims, some of which may speak Urdū) Oman (90,000) Canada (80,895 [2001]) Bahrain (80,000) Mauritius (74,000) Qatar (70,000) Germany (40,000) Norway (26,950 [2005]) France (20,000) Spain (18,000 [2004]) Sweden (10,000 [2001] Thailand Afghanistan Japan (8,000) Fiji Guyana Suriname Australia Denmark Italy New Zealand World Total: 60,503,579

Official status

Urdū is the national language of Pakistan and is spoken and understood throughout the country. It shares official language status with English. It is used in education, literature, office and court business, media, and in religious institutions. It holds in itself a repository of the cultural, religious and social heritage of the country. Although English is used in most elite circles, and Punjabi has a plurality of native speakers, Urdū is the lingua franca and is expected to prevail. Urdū is also one of the officially recognized state languages in India and has official language status in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, and Uttar Pradesh, and the national capital, Delhi. While the government school system in most other states emphasizes Standard Hindi, at universities in cities such as Lucknow, Aligarh and Hyderabad, Urdū is spoken, learned, and regarded as a language of prestige.

Classification and related languages

Urdū is a member of the Indo-Aryan family of languages (i.e., those languages descending from Sanskrit), which is in turn a branch of the Indo-Iranian group (which comprises the Indo-Aryan and the Iranian branches), which itself is a member of the Indo-European linguistic family. If Hindi and Urdū are considered to be the same language (Hindustani or Hindi-Urdū), then Urdū can be considered to be a part of a dialect continuum which extends across eastern Iran, Afghanistan and modern Pakistan—right into eastern India. These idioms all have similar grammatical structures and share a large portion of their vocabulary. Punjabi, for instance, is very similar to Urdū; Punjabi written in the Shahmukhi script can be understood by speakers of Urdū with little difficulty, but spoken Punjabi has a very different phonology (pronunciation system) and can be harder to understand for Urdū speakers.

Dialects

Urdū has four recognised dialects: Dakhini, Pinjari, Rekhta, and Modern Vernacular Urdū (based on the Khariboli dialect of the Delhi region). Sociolinguists also consider Urdū iself one of the four major variants of the Hindi-Urdū dialect continuum.

Modern Vernacular Urdū is the form of the language that is least widespread and is spoken around Delhi, Lucknow, Karachi and Lahore, it becomes increasingly divergent from the original form of Urdū as it loses some of the complicated Persian and Arabic vocabulary used in everyday terms.

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

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

Grammar

Despite Urdū and English both being Indo-European languages, Urdū grammar can be very complex and is different in many ways from what English-speakers are used to. Most notably, Urdū is a subject-object-verb language, meaning that verbs usually fall at the end of the sentence rather than before the object (as in English). Urdū also shows mixed ergativity so that, in some cases, verbs agree with the object of a sentence rather than the subject. Unlike English, Urdū has no definite article (the). The numeral ek might be used as the indefinite singular article (a/an) if this needs to be stressed.

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UrdÅ« uses postpositions where English uses prepositions. Other differences include gender, honorifics, interrogatives, use of cases, and different tenses. While being complicated, UrdÅ« grammar is fairly regular, with irregularities being relatively limited. Despite differences in vocabulary and writing, UrdÅ« grammar is nearly identical with that of Hindi. UrdÅ« also has a unique punctuation system. Periods are sometimes used to end a sentence, though the traditional “full stop” (a horizontal line “-”) is more generally used. After a heading, a colon followed by a dash (-:) is used. Colons are used in almost the same way as in English. Semi-colons and ellipsis (…) are not generally used in UrdÅ«. However, we can see their use sometimes because UrdÅ« is still evolving and is influenced by English. UrdÅ« punctuation sometimes uses western conventions for commas, exclamation points, and question marks.

Genders

UrdÅ« has two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine. All male human beings and male animals (as well as those animals and plants which are perceived as being “male”) are masculine. All female human beings and female animals (as well as those animals and plants which are perceived as being “female”) are feminine. Things, inanimate articles and abstract nouns are also either masculine or feminine according to convention, which must be memorized by non-UrdÅ« speakers if they wish to learn correct UrdÅ«. While this is similar to Hindi and most other Indo-European languages such as French, it is a very challenging learning requirement for speakers of languages which do not have such gender inflection. It is also a challenge for those who are used to only the English language, which although an Indo-European language, has eliminated almost all of its gender inflection.

The ending of a word, if a vowel, usually helps in this gender classification. If a word of Hindi origin ends in long ā, it is normally masculine. If a word ends in ī, i, or iyā, it is normally feminine. Similarly, Urdu tries to match the gender of words borrowed from Arabic, Persian, and other languages that have grammatical gender. The categorisation of Urdū words directly borrowed from English is arbitrary, but may be influenced by how the words end phonologically in English. Adjectives ending in a long [ɑ:] must be inflected to agree with the gender of the noun.

Vocabulary

Urdū has a vocabulary rich in words with Indian and Middle Eastern origins. The borrowings are dominated by words from Persian and Arabic. There are also a small number of borrowings from Turkish, Portuguese, and more recently English. Many of the words of Arabic origin have different nuances of meaning and usage than they do in Arabic.

Writing system

 

The Urdū Nasta’liq alphabet, with names in the Devanāgarī and Latin alphabets

Note: This page or section contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for a pronunciation key.

Nowadays, Urdū is generally written right-to left in an extension of the Persian alphabet, which is itself an extension of the Arabic alphabet. Urdū is associated with the Nasta’liq style of Arabic calligraphy, whereas Arabic is generally written in the modernized Naskh style. Nasta’liq is notoriously difficult to typeset, so Urdū newspapers were hand-written by masters of calligraphy, known as katib or khush-navees, until the late 1980s.

Historically, UrdÅ« was also written in the Kaithi script. A highly-Persianized and technical form of UrdÅ« was the lingua franca of the law courts of the British administration in Bengal, Bihar, and the North-West Provinces & Oudh. Until the late 19th century, all proceedings and court transactions in this register of UrdÅ« was written officially in the Persian script. In 1880, Sir Ashley Eden, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal abolished the use of the Persian alphabet in the law courts of Bengal and Bihar and ordered the exclusive use of Kaithi, a popular script used for both UrdÅ« and Hindi Kaithi’s association with UrdÅ« and Hindi was ultimately eliminated by the political contest between these languages and their scripts, in which the Persian script was definitively linked to UrdÅ«.

More recently in India, Urdū speakers have adopted Devanagari for publishing Urdu periodicals and have innovated new strategies to mark Urdū in Devanagari as distinct from Hindi in Devanagari The popular Urdū monthly magazine, महकता आंचल (Mahakta Anchal), is published in Delhi in Devanagari in order to target the generation of Muslim boys and girls who do not know the Persian script. Such publishers have introduced new orthographic features into Devanagari for the purpose of representing Urdū sounds. One example is the use of अ (Devanagari a) with vowel signs to mimic contexts of ع (‘ain). To Urdū publishers, the use of Devanagari gives them a greater audience, but helps them to preserve the distinct identity of Urdū when written in Devanagari.

The Daily Jang was the first Urdū newspaper to be typeset digitally in Nasta’liq by computer. There are efforts underway to develop more sophisticated and user-friendly Urdū support on computers and the Internet. Nowadays, nearly all Urdū newspapers, magazines, journals, and periodicals are composed on computers via various Urdū software programs. In India, ghazals are often found transliterated into Devanāgarī, as an aid for those Hindī-speakers, who can comprehend Urdū, but cannot read the Perso-Arabic script.

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

Letter	Name of letter	Pronunciation in the IPA
ا	alif	[ə, ɑ] after a consonant; silent when initial. Close to an English long an as in Mask.
ب	be	[b] English b.
Ù¾	pe	[p] English p.
ت	te	dental [t̪] Close to French t as in trois.
ٹ	ṭe	retroflex [ʈ] Close to English T.
Ø«	se	[s] Close to English s
ج	jīm	[dʒ] Same as English j
Úâ€	cÄ«m/ce	[tʃ] Same as English ch, not like Scottish ch
ح	baṛī he	[h] voicleless h, partially an Alveolar consonant
Ø®	khe	[x] Slightly rolled version of Scottish “ch” as in loch
د	dāl	dental [d̪]
ڈ	ḍāl	retroflex [ɖ]
ذ	zāl	[z]
ر	re	dental [r]
ڑ	ṛe	retroflex [ɽ]
ز	ze	[z]
Ú˜	zhe	[Ê’]
س	sīn	[s]
ش	shīn	[ʃ]
ص	su’ād	[s]
ض	zu’ād	[z]
Ø·	to’e	[t]
ظ	zo’e	[z]
ع	‘ain	[ɑ] after a consonant; otherwise [ʔ], [ə], or silent.
غ	ghain	[ɣ] voiced version of [x]
ف	fe	[f]
ق	qāf	[q]
ک	kāf	[k]
گ	gāf	[g]
ل	lām	[l]
م	mīm	[m]
Ùâ€	nÅ«n	[n] or a nasal vowel
Ùˆ	vā’o	[v, u, ÊŠ, o, ow]
ہ, ﮩ, ﮨ	choṭī he	[ɑ] at the end of a word, otherwise [h] or silent
ھ	do cashmī he	indicates that the preceding consonant is aspirated (p, t, c, k) or murmured (b, d, j, g).
ی	choṭī ye	[j, i, e, ɛ]
ے	baṛī ye	[eː]
Ø¡	hamzah	[Ê”] or silent

Transliteration

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

Roman Urdū also holds significance among the Christians of North India. Urdū was the dominant native language among Christians of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan in the early part of 1900s and is still used by some people in these Indian states. Indian Christians often used the Roman script for writing Urdū. Thus Roman Urdū was a common way of writing among Indian Christians in these states up to the 1960s. The Bible Society of India publishes Roman Urdū Bibles which enjoyed sale late into the 1960s (though they are still published today). Church songbooks are also common in Roman Urdū. However, the usage of Roman Urdū is declining with the wider use of Hindi and English in these states. The major Hindi-Urdu South Asian film industries, Bollywood and Lollywood, are also noteworthy for their use of Roman Urdū for their movie titles.

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

Literature

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

Prose

Religious

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

Literary

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

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

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

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

Other genres include saférnāma (i.e: Odyssey, lit: travel story), mazmoon (i.e: Essay), sarguzisht, inshaeya, murasela, and khud navvisht (i.e: Autobiography).

Poetry

 

Mirza Ghalib (1796-1869), a respected poet of Urdū.

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

• Diwan (دیوان)
• Doha (دوہا)
• Geet (گیت)
• Ghazal (غزل), as practiced by many poets in the Arab tradition. Mir, Ghalib, Dagh and Faiz are well-known composers of ghazal.
• Hamd (حمد)
• Kalam (کلام)
• Kulyat (کلیات)
• Marsia (مرثیہ)
• Masnavi (مثنوی)
• Musaddas (مسدس)
• Naat (نعت)
• Nazm (نظم)
• Noha (نوحہ)
• Qaseeda (قصیدہ)
• Qat’ã (قطعہ)
• Rubai (a.k.a. Rubayyat or Rubaiyat) (رباعیات)
• Sehra (سہرا)
• Shehr a’ashob
• Soz (سوز)

Foreign forms such as the sonnet, azad nazm (a.k.a Free verse) and haiku have also been used by some modern Urdū poets.

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

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

Urdū poetry terminology

Ash’ār (اشعار) (Couplet). It consists of two lines, Misra (مصرعہ); first line is called Misra-e-oola (مصرع اولی) and the second is called ‘Misra-e-sānÄ«’ (مصرعہ ثانی). Each verse embodies a single thought or subject (sing) She’r (شعر).

History

UrdÅ« developed as local Indo-Aryan dialects came under the influence of the Muslim courts that ruled South Asia from the early thirteenth century. The official language of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and their successor states, as well as the cultured language of poetry and literature, was Persian, while the language of religion was Arabic. Most of the Sultans and nobility in the Sultanate period were Persianised Turks from Central Asia who spoke Turkish as their mother tongue. The Mughals were also from Central Asia and spoke Turkish as their first language; however the Mughals later adopted Persian. Persian became the preferred language of the Muslim elite of north India before the Mughals entered the scene. Babur’s mother tongue was Turkish and he wrote exclusively in Turkish. His son and successor Humayun also spoke and wrote in Turkish. Muzaffar Alam, a noted scholar of Mughal and Indo-Persian history, suggests that Persian became the lingua franca of the empire under Akbar for various political and social factors due to its non-sectarian and fluid nature. The mingling of these languages led to a vernacular that is the ancestor of today’s UrdÅ«. Dialects of this vernacular are spoken today in cities and villages throughout Pakistan and northern India. Cities with a particularly strong tradition of UrdÅ« include Hyderabad, Karachi, Lucknow and Lahore.

The name Urdū

The term UrdÅ« came into use when Shahjehan built the Red Fort in Delhi. The word UrdÅ« itself comes from the Turkish word ordu, “tent” or “army”, from which we get the word “horde”. Hence UrdÅ« is sometimes called “LashkarÄ« zabān” or the language of the army. Furthermore, armies of India often contained soldiers with various native tongues. Hence, UrdÅ« was the chosen language to address the soldiers as it abridged several languages.

Wherever Muslim soldiers and officials settled, they carried Urdū with them. Urdū enjoyed commanding status in the literary courts of late Muslim rulers and Nawabs, and flourished under their patronage, partially displacing Farsi as the language of elite in the then Indian society.

UrdÅ« continued as one of many languages in Northwest India. In 1947, UrdÅ« was established as the national language of the Islamic Republic of Pakistān in the hope that this move would unite and homogenise the various ethnic groups of the new nation. UrdÅ« suddenly went from a language of a minority to the language of the majority. Today, UrdÅ« is taught throughout Pakistāni schools and spoken in government positions, and it is also common in much of Northern India. UrdÅ«’s sister language, HindÄ«, is the official language of India.

Urdū and Hindī

Because of their great similarities of grammar and core vocabularies, many linguists do not distinguish between HindÄ« and UrdÅ« as separate languages–at least not in reference to the informal spoken registers. For them, ordinary informal UrdÅ« and HindÄ« can be seen as variants of the same language (HindustānÄ«) with the difference being that UrdÅ« is supplemented with a Perso-Arabic vocabulary and Hindi a Sanskritic vocabulary. Additionally, there is the convention of Urdu being written in Perso-Arabic script, and Hindi in Devanagari. The standard, “proper” grammars of both languages are based on Khariboli grammar —the dialect of the Delhi region. So, with respect to grammar, the languages are mutually intelligible when spoken, and can be thought of as the same language.

Despite their similar grammars, however, Standard UrdÅ« and Standard HindÄ« are distinct languages in regards to their very different vocabularies, their writing systems, and their political and sociolinguistic connotations. Put simply, in the context of everyday casual speech, Hindi and Urdu can be considered dialects of the same language. In terms of their mutual intelligibility in their formal or “proper” registers, however, they are much less mutually intelligible and can be considered separate languages–they have basically the same grammar but very different vocabularies. There are two fundamental distinctions between them:

• The source of vocabulary (borrowed from Persian or inherited from Sanskrit): In colloquial situations in much of the Indian subcontinent, where neither learned vocabulary nor writing is used, the distinction between the UrdÅ« and HindÄ« is very small.

• The most important distinction at this level is in the script: if written in the Perso-Arabic script, the language is generally considered to be UrdÅ«, and if written in Devanagari it is generally considered to be Hindi. Since the Partition of India, the formal registers used in education and the media in India have become increasingly divergent from UrdÅ« in their vocabulary. Where there is no colloquial word for a concept, Standard UrdÅ« uses Perso-Arabic vocabulary, while Standard HindÄ« uses Sanskrit vocabulary. This results in the official languages being heavily Sanskritised or Persianised, and unintelligible to speakers educated in the other standard (as far as the formal vocabulary is concerned).

Note that for the purpose of linguistics, neither of above two arguments qualify for the purpose of considering HindÄ« and UrdÅ« to be separate languages. For example, English has about 80-90% of its technical and formal vocabulary coming from Latin (mostly through French). But this fact does not make English a Romance language (i.e., languages descending from Latin) —English is always considered to be a Germanic language, because its “common and everyday vocabulary” and grammar is based upon Old German. Script never causes distinction between languages, because linguistics deals with language as it is “spoken,” regarding script as but choice construction.

Hindustani is the name often given to the language as it developed over hundreds of years throughout India (which formerly included what is now Pakistan). In the same way that the core vocabulary of English evolved from Old English (Anglo-Saxon) but includes a large number of words borrowed from French and other languages (whose pronunciations often changed naturally so as to become easier for speakers of English to pronounce), what may be called Hindustani can be said to have evolved from Sanskrit while borrowing many Persian and Arabic words over the years, and changing the pronunciations (and often even the meanings) of those words to make them easier for Hindustani speakers to pronounce. Therefore, Hindustani is the language as it evolved organically.

Linguistically speaking, Standard Hindī is a form of colloquial Hindustānī, with lesser use of Persian and Arabic loanwords, while inheriting its formal vocabulary from Sanskrit; Standard Urdū is also a form of Hindustānī, de-Sanskritised, with its a significant part of formal vocabulary consisting of loanwords from Persian and Arabic. The difference, thus is in the vocabulary, and not the structure of the language.

The difference is also sociolinguistic: When people speak Hindustani (i.e., when they are speaking colloquially) speakers who are Muslims will usually say that they are speaking Urdu, and those who are Hindus will typically say that they are speaking Hindi, even though they are speaking essentially the same language.

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

Urdū and Bollywood

 

A typical Bollywood poster

The Indian film industry based in Mumbai is often called Bollywood. The language used in Bollywood films is often called HindÄ«, but most dialogues are actually written in HindustānÄ« — they can be understood by UrdÅ« and HindÄ« speakers alike. The film industry wants to reach the largest possible audience, and it cannot do that if the dialogue of the film is too one-sidedly HindÄ« or UrdÅ«. This rule is broken only for song lyrics, which use elevated, poetic language. Often, this means using poetic UrdÅ« words, of Arabic and Persian origin. A few films, like Umrao Jaan, Pakeezah, and Mughal-e-azam, have used vocabulary that leans more towards UrdÅ«, as they depict places and times when UrdÅ« would have been used.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, Bollywood films displayed the name of the film in Hindī, Urdū, and Roman scripts. Most Bollywood films today present film titles in Roman, although some also include the Hindī and Urdū scripts.

Dakkhini Urdū

Dakkhini UrdÅ« is a dialect of the Urdu language spoken in the Deccan region of southern India. It is distinct by its mixture of vocabulary from Marathi and Telugu, as well as some vocabulary from Arabic, Persian and Turkish that are not found in the standard dialect of Urdu. In terms of pronunciation, the easiest way to recognize a native speaker is their pronunciation of the letter “qāf” (ﻕ) as “kh” (ﺥ). The Dialect is very reflective of the relaxed attitude of the people which allows the coinage of words, much like ebonics. The majority of people who speak this language are from Bangalore, Hyderabad, Mysore and parts of Chennai.
Distinct words, very typical of Dakkhini dialect of Urdu:

Nakko (instead of Nahi in Traditional Urdū) =No

Hau (instead of Han in Traditional Urdū) =Yes

Kaiku (instead of Kyun in Traditional Urdū) =Why

Mereku (instead of Mujhe in Traditional Urdū) = For me

Tereku (instead of Tujhe in Traditional Urdū) =For you

Also see: Dakkhini

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