Urdu (/ˈʊərduː/; Urdu: اُردُو‎ ALA-LC: Urdū [ˈʊrduː] ) (also known as Lashkari, locally written لشکری [lʌʃkɜ:i:])—or, more precisely, Modern Standard Urdu—is a Persianised standard register of the Hindustani language. It is the official national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. In India, it is one of the 22 official languages recognized in the Constitution of India, having official status in the six states of Jammu and Kashmir, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal, as well as the national capital territory of Delhi.

Apart from specialized vocabulary, spoken Urdu is mutually intelligible with standard Hindi, another recognized register of Hindustani. The Urdu variant of Hindustani received recognition and patronage under British rule when the British replaced the local official languages with English and Hindustani written in Nastaʿlīq script, as the official language in North and Northwestern India.Religious, social, and political factors pushed for a distinction between Urdu and Hindi in India, leading to the Hindi–Urdu controversy.

According to Nationalencyklopedin's 2010 estimates, Urdu is the 21st most spoken first language in the world, with approximately 66 million speakers. According to Ethnologue's 2017 estimates, Urdu, along with standard Hindi and the languages of the Hindi belt (as Hindustani), is the 3rd most spoken language in the world, with approximately 329.1 million native speakers, and 697.4 million total speakers.

History

Urdu, like Hindi, is a form of Hindustani. It 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. Around 75% of Urdu words have their etymological roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit, and approximately 99% of Urdu verbs have their roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit. Because Persian-speaking sultans ruled the Indian subcontinent for a number of centuries, Urdu was influenced by Persian and to a lesser extent, Arabic, which have contributed to about 25% of Urdu's vocabulary. Although the word Urdu is derived from the Turkic word ordu (army) or orda, from which English horde is also derived, Turkic borrowings in Urdu are minimal 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 Persianized versions of the original words. There have been attempts to "purify" Urdu and Hindi, by purging Urdu of Sanskrit words, and Hindi of Persian loanwords, and new vocabulary draws primarily from Persian and Arabic for Urdu and from Sanskrit for Hindi. English has exerted a heavy influence on both as a co-official language.

Linguistics

An Indo-European language, Urdu is related to other commonly spoken languages such as Spanish and English. Its closest related relative is Hindi, however, and they are often grouped as different registers of the same langauge

Classification

Urdu's full classification is as follows:

Indo-European > Indo-Iranian > Indo-Aryan > Central Zone (Hindi) > Western Hindi > Hindustani > Khariboli > Urdu

Morphophonemics

Urdu has 21 vowel phonemes. These phonemes are distinguished based on place of articulation as well as nasalness and length.

Urdu has a core set of 28 consonants inherited from earlier Indo-Aryan. Supplementing these are 2 consonants that are internal developments in specific word-medial contexts, and 7 consonants originally found in loan words, whose expression is dependent on factors such as status (class, education, etc.) and cultural register (Modern Standard Hindi vs Urdu). Consonants are contrasted based on place and manner of articulation, as well as voicing and aspiration.

Syntax

Urdu nouns decline for two numbers, singular and plural; two genders, masculine and feminine; and three cases, direction, oblique and vocative. Nouns may be further divided into two classes based on declension, called type-I (marked) and type-II (unmarked). The basic difference between the two categories is that the former has characteristic terminations in the direct singular while the latter does not.

Urdu also relies extensively on postpositions to help convey meaning. There are seven one-word primary postpositions. They can be seen, transliterated, in the following table, along with the meaning they convey.

Postposition	Meaning
kā	genitive
ko	indirect or direct object
ne	ergative
se	ablative, with other meanings
mẽ	"in"
par	"on"
tak	"until, up to"

Urdu has personal pronouns for the first and second persons, while for the third person demonstratives are used, which can be categorized deictically as proximate and non-proximate. Pronouns distinguish cases of direct, oblique, and dative. The direct form of all the pronouns can be seen in the table below. Like many Indo-European languages, Urdu has three second person pronouns ("you"), constituting a threefold scale of sociolinguistic formality: respectively "intimate", "familiar", and "polite". The "intimate" is grammatically singular while the "familiar" and "polite" are grammatically plural.

Pronoun	Meaning
mãĩ	1 singular
ham	1 plural
tū	2 intimate
tum	2 familiar
āp	2 polite
ye	3 proximal (singular and plural)
vo	3 non-proximal (singular and plural)

The Urdu verbal system is largely structured around a combination of aspect and tense/mood. Like the nominal system, the Hindustani verb involves successive layers of (inflectional) elements to the right of the lexical base.

Urdu has 3 aspects: perfective, habitual, and continuous, each having overt morphological correlates.These are participle forms, inflecting for gender and number by way of a vowel termination, like adjectives. The perfective, though displaying a "number of irregularities and morphophonemic adjustments", is the simplest, being just the verb stem followed by the agreement vowel. The habitual forms from the imperfective participle; verb stem, plus -t-, then vowel. The continuous forms periphrastically through compounding (see below) with the perfective of rahnā "to stay".

Derived from honā "to be" are five copula forms: present, past, subjunctive, presumptive, contrafactual (aka "past conditional"). Used both in basic predicative/existential sentences and as verbal auxiliaries to aspectual forms, these constitute the basis of tense and mood.

Non-aspectual forms include the infinitive, the imperative, and the conjunctive. Mentioned morphological conditions such the subjunctive, "presumptive", etc. are applicable to both copula roots for auxiliary usage with aspectual forms and to non-copula roots directly for often unspecified (non-aspectual) finite forms.

Finite verbal agreement is with the nominative subject, except in the transitive perfective, where it is with the direct object, with the erstwhile subject taking the ergative construction -ne (see postpositions above). The perfective aspect thus displays split ergativity.

Orthography

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. Nasta’liq is notoriously difficult to typeset, so Urdu newspapers were hand-written by masters of calligraphy, known as kātib or khush-nawīs, until the late 1980s. One handwritten Urdu newspaper, The Musalman, is still published daily in Chennai.

Written Sample:

دفعہ ۱: تمام انسان آزاد اور حقوق و عزت کے اعتبار سے برابر پیدا ہوئے ہیں۔ انہیں ضمیر اور عقل ودیعت ہوئی ہے۔ اس لیے انہیں ایک دوسرے کے ساتھ بھائی چارے کا سلوک کرنا چاہئے۔

Spoken sample:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--Hf1aO4sBE (folktale)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_tXUU5gH7I (greetings)

Sources & Further reading

Wikipedia articles on Urdu and Hindustani

What now?

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