Urdu language is a language spoken in Pakistan and in the northern parts of India. Urdu closely resembles Hindi, the national language of India. Scholars sometimes speak of the two languages collectively as Hindi-Urdu. In the spoken form, the two languages are essentially the same. The common spoken form is sometimes called Hindustani. In the written form, Urdu and Hindi use different alphabets and different methods of writing.
Urdu belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. It is written from right to left and uses a Persian-Arabic alphabet with 38 basic symbols. The grammatical structures and basic vocabulary of Urdu developed from Sanskrit, an ancient Indian language. Urdu also includes many words borrowed from Persian, Arabic, Turkish, and other languages.
In the 1200’s, Hindi-Urdu emerged around the city of Delhi as a lingua franca—that is, a common language used in trade or communication between speakers of different native languages. Urdu developed further under the Mughal Empire, which ruled most of India in the 1500’s and 1600’s. Early literature in Urdu appeared in Hyderabad, India, in the 1600’s. In 1947, Urdu became the national language of Pakistan. However, most Pakistanis speak other regional languages, such as Balochi, Pashto (also called Pakhto), Punjabi, or Sindhi. Urdu is also one of the official languages of India.
See also Hindi language ; Pakistan (Cultural groups and languages) ; Sanskrit language .
