LANGUAGE
Urdu (اردو, historically spelled Ordu), is an Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-Iranian branch, belonging to Indo-European family of languages. It developed under Persian and Arabic, to some lesser degree also under Turkic influence in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1526–1858 AD).
Urdu refers to a standardized register of Hindustani termed khaṛībolī that emerged as a standard dialect. The grammatical description in this article concerns this standard Urdu. In general, the term "Urdu" can encompass dialects of Hindustani other than the standardized versions.
Standard Urdu has approximately the twentieth largest population of native speakers, among all languages. It is the national language of Pakistan as well as one of the twenty three official languages of India.
Urdu is often contrasted with Hindi, another standardized form of Hindustani. The main difference between the two is that Standard Urdu is written in Nastaliq calligraphy style of the Perso-Arabic script and draws heavily on Persian and Arabic loan words, while Standard Hindi is written in Devanāgarī and has inherited significant vocabulary from Sanskrit. Linguists therefore consider Urdu and Hindi to be two standardized forms of the same language.
The Urdu alphabet is the script used for the Urdu language. It is a modification of the Perso-Arabic script, which is itself a derivative of the Arabic alphabet. Like the script of Semitic languages, Urdu is written from right to left. Urdu is typically written in a different style of the script, Nasta'liq, whereas Arabic is more commonly written in the less-calligraphic Naskh style.
Usually, bare transliterations of Urdū into Roman letters omit many phonemic elements that have no equivalent in English or other languages commonly written in the Roman alphabet. Urdu Language Authority has developed a number of systems with specific notations to signify non-English sounds, but these can only be properly read by someone already familiar with Urdu, Persian, or Arabic for letters such as:ژ خ غ ط ص or ق and Hindi for letters such as ڑ. The scripts allow people who understand the language but without knowledge of their written forms to communicate with each other.
Nowadays, Urdu is generally 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.
Historically, Urdu was also written in the Kaithi script. A highly technical and Persian form of Urdu was the lingua franca of the law courts of the British administration in Bengal, Bihar, and the North-West Provinces & Oudh. Until the late 19th century, all proceedings and court transactions in this register of Urdu was written officially in the Persian script. In 1880, Sir Ashley Eden, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal abolished the use of the Persian alphabet in the law courts of Bengal and Bihar and ordered the exclusive use of Kaithi, a popular script used for both Urdu and Hindi Kaithi's association with Urdu and Hindi was ultimately eliminated by the political contest between these languages and their scripts, in which the Persian script was definitively linked to Urdu.
A list of the Urdu alphabet and pronunciation is given below. Urdu contains many historical spellings from Arabic and Persian, and therefore has many irregularities. The Arabic letters yaa and haa are split into two in Urdu: one of the yaa variants is used at the ends of words for the sound [i], and one of the haa variants is used to indicate the aspirated consonants. The retroflex consonants needed to be added as well; this was accomplished by placing a superscript ط (to'e) above the corresponding dental consonants. Several letters which represent distinct consonants in Arabic are conflated in Persian, and this has carried over to Urdu.
Urdu numerals
