Concept

Urdu

Overview

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. 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 register of the Hindustani language. While formal Urdu draws literary, political, and technical vocabulary from Persian and Arabic, formal Hindi draws these aspects from Sanskrit; consequently, the two languages' mutual intelligibility effectively decreases as the level of formality increases.

Urdu originated geographically in the upper Ganga-Yamuna doab, in and around the Delhi region of India, 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. 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.

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.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest integration. How small is the degree of this integration, however, when compared with that reached in well-developed languages is shown both by the great length of the compound words used for things and acts of constant…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
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Nurses can teach us this language; they understand all their nurslings say to them, they answer them, and keep up long conversations with them; and though they use words, these words are quite useless. It is not the hearing of the word, but its accompanying intonation that is understood. To the language of intonation is added the no less forcible language of gesture. The child uses, not its weak hands, but its face…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
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This word, therefore, expressing so very abstract and metaphysical an idea, would not easily or readily occur to the first formers of language. What are called the personal pronouns, it may be observed, are among the last words of which children learn to make use. A child, speaking of itself, says, _Billy walks_, _Billy sits_, instead of _I walk_, _I sit_.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
States what Urdu is.
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Urdu

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