Urdu

Urdu

Urdu is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan family that developed under Persian, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, and Sanskrit influence in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1200-1800).

Taken by itself, Urdu is approximately the twentieth most populous natively spoken language in the world, and is the national language of Pakistan as well as one of the 24 national languages of India.

Urdu also refers to a standardised register of Hindustani that was made one of the official languages of Pakistan and India. The grammatical description in this article concerns this standard Urdu.

Urdu is often contrasted with Hindi, another standardised form of Hindustani that is the official language of India. The primary differences between the two are that Standard Urdu is written in Nastaliq script and draws heavily on Persian and Arabic vocabulary, while standard Hindi is written in Devanāgarī and has supplemented some of its Persian and Arabic vocabulary with words from Sanskrit . The term "Urdu" also includes dialects of Hindustani other than the standardised languages. Other than these, linguists consider Urdu and Hindi to be the same language.