Urdu

About Urdu

Urdu (اُردُو‬‎ Urdū) is a living language of the Indian subcontinent, spoken by 100 million people world-wide. It is the national lingua franca of Pakistan and an official language of several Indian states. It is also often spoken and well understood in parts of the Middle East with large South Asian communities.

Urdu is closely related to Hindi; speakers of these two languages generally understand each other very well, which makes Hindi movies popular in Pakistan and Pakistani singers in India. However, Urdu has some vocabulary borrowed from Persian, Arabic, and Turkish which is not found in Hindi; these words are usually used at academic levels. Together, Hindi and Urdu are called the Hindustani language, and when combined, constitute one of the most spoken languages in the world and according to some estimates, rank second or third. The writing systems of the two languages are completely different as Urdu is written in a modified version of the Persian and Arabic writing system known as Nast'alīq (نستعليق) and one who learns to read and write Urdu script can read and write Arabic and Persian to a great extent, whereas Hindi uses a totally different script, Devanagari, which is indigenous to India. Urdu is written right-to-left like Arabic or Persian, while Hindi is written left-to-right. Dakini is a dialect of Urdu with fewer Arabic and Persian loanwords and is spoken in the

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)。Photography via Wikimedia Commons.