Introduction to Urdu
Urdu is a Central Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-Iranian branch, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. It is a derivative of Hindustani, and is the national language and one of the two official languages (the other being English) of Pakistan. Spoken in five Indian states, it is also one of the 22 official languages of India. Its vocabulary developed under Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and Turkic. In modern times Urdu vocabulary has been significantly influenced by Punjabi and even English. Urdu was mainly developed in western Uttar Pradesh, India, which is the seat of Hindi and Hindustani languages in the Indian Subcontinent, but began taking shape during the Delhi Sultanate as well as Mughal Empire (1526–1858) in the South Asia.
There are between 60 and 80 million native speakers of standard Urdu (Khari Boli). According to the SIL Ethnologue (1999 data), Urdu اردو/Hindi is the fifth most spoken language in the world. According to George Weber’s article Top Languages: The World’s 10 Most Influential Languages in Language Today, Hindi/Urdu is the fourth most spoken language in the world, with 4.7 percent of the world's population, after Mandarin, English, and Spanish. Urdu is also one of the officially recognized languages in India and has official language status in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, and Uttar Pradesh, and the national capital, New Delhi.
Standard Urdu has approximately the twentieth largest population of native speakers, among all languages. Urdu is often contrasted with Hindi, another standardized form of Hindustani. The main differences between the two are that Standard Urdu is conventionally written in Nastaliq calligraphy style of the Perso-Arabic script and draws vocabulary more heavily from Persian and Arabic, while Standard Hindi is conventionally written in Devanāgarī and draws vocabulary from Sanskrit comparatively more heavily. Most linguists nonetheless consider Urdu and Hindi to be two standardized forms of the same language; however, others classify them separately due to sociolinguistic differences.
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 Nasta’liq style of Arabic calligraphy, whereas Arabic is generally written in the modernized Naskh style. Nasta’liq is notoriously difficult to typeset, so Urdu newspapers were hand-written by masters of calligraphy, known as katib or khush-navees, until the late 1980s. The Daily Jang/daily waqt was the first Urdu newspaper to be typeset digitally in Nasta’liq by computer. There are efforts underway to develop more sophisticated and user-friendly Urdu support on computers and the Internet. Nowadays, nearly all Urdu newspapers, magazines, journals, and periodicals are composed on computers via various Urdu software programmes, the most widespread of which is InPage Desktop Publishing package. Microsoft has included Urdu language support in all new versions of Windows and both Vista and Office 2007 are available in Urdu through Language Interface Pack support.
Examples
| English | Urdu |
| Hello | السلامعلیکم |
| Hello | وعلیکمالسلام |
| Goodbye | خداحافظ |
| yes | ہاں |
| no | نہ |
| please | مہربانی |
| thank you | شکریہ |
| Please come in | تشریفلائیے |
| Please have a seat | تشریفرکھیئے |
| I am happy to meet you | اپسےملکرخوشیہوئی |
| I do not speak Urdu. | میںاردونہیںبولتا/بولتی |
