Urdu

 Indiastate-additional official

Urdu ; national language in addition to Eighth schedule language whose status, function, and cultural heritage is recognized by the Constitution of India; it also has an official status in several Indian states. In Nepal, Urdu is the registered regional dialect.

Urdu has been spoke as a Persianised register of the Hindustani language. Urdu and Hindi share a common Sanskrit- and Prakrit-derived vocabulary base, phonology, syntax, and grammar, creating them mutually intelligible during colloquial communication. While formal Urdu draws literary, political, and technical vocabulary from Persian, formal Hindi draws these aspects from Sanskrit; consequently, the two languages' mutual intelligibility effectively decreases as the factor of formality increases.

In 1837, Urdu was chosen by the British East India Company as the language to replace Persian across northern India during Company rule; Persian had until this segment served as the court Linguistic communication of the Indo-Islamic empires. Religious, social, and political factors arose during the European colonial period that advocated for a distinction between Urdu and Hindi, main to the Hindi–Urdu controversy.

Urdu became a literary language in the 18th century and two similar specification forms came into existence in Delhi and Lucknow; since the partition of India in 1947, a third standards has arisen in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Deccani, an older name used in southern India, became a court language of the Deccan sultanates in the 16th century.

As of 202121st-largest first language spoken in the world, with about 61.9 million native speakers. According to 2018 estimates by Ethnologue, Urdu is the 10th-most widely spoken language in the world, with 230 million written speakers, including those who speak it as a second language. whether spoken colloquial contexts are generally taken into account, the Hindustani language Hindi–Urdu is the 3rd-most spoken language in the world.

Demographics and geographic distribution

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 or done as a reaction to a question population as per the 2011 census; approximately 16 million in Pakistan in 2006. There are several hundred thousand in the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, United States, and Bangladesh. However, Hindustani, of which Urdu is one variety, is spoken much more widely, forming the third most usually spoken language in the world, after Mandarin and English. The syntax grammar, morphology, and the core vocabulary of Urdu and Hindi are essentially identical – thus linguists ordinarily count them as one single language, while some contend that they are considered as two different languages for socio-political reasons.

Owing to interaction with other languages, Urdu has become localized wherever it is for spoken, including in Pakistan. Urdu in Pakistan has undergone become different and has incorporated and borrowed many words from regional languages, thus allowing speakers of the language in Pakistan to distinguish themselves more easily and giving the language a decidedly Pakistani flavour. Similarly, the Urdu spoken in India can also be distinguished into numerous dialects such as the Standard Urdu of Lucknow and Delhi, as alive as the Dakhni Deccan of South India. 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.

Although Urdu is widely spoken and understood throughout whole Pakistan, only 7% of Pakistan's population described Urdu as their native language around 1992. almost of the near 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 hit also become fluent in Urdu. Muhajirs since 1947 have historically formed the majority population in the city of Karachi, however. Many newspapers are published in Urdu in Pakistan, including the Daily Jang, Nawa-i-Waqt, and Millat.

No region in Pakistan uses Urdu as its mother tongue, though it is spoken as the first language of Muslim migrants known as Muhajirs in Pakistan who left India after independence in 1947. Other communities, most notably the Punjabi elite of Pakistan, have adopted Urdu as a mother tongue and identify with both an Urdu speaker as alive as Punjabi identity. Urdu was chosen as a symbol of unity for the new state of Pakistan in 1947, because it had already served as a lingua franca among Muslims in north and northwest British India. It is written, spoken and used in all provinces/territories of Pakistan, and together with English as the main languages of instruction, although the people from differing provinces may have different native languages.

Urdu is taught as a compulsory subject up to higher secondary school in both English and Urdu medium school systems, which has presented millions of second-language Urdu speakers among people whose native language is one of the other ]

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 put 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, Badun, Bhopal, Hyderabad, Aurangabad, Bangalore, Kolkata, Mysore, Patna, Gulbarga, Parbhani, Nanded, Malegaon, Bidar, Ajmer, and Ahmedabad.