About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Urdu

Encyclopedia : U : UR : URD : Urdu

ə This article contains nonstandard pronunciation information which should be rewritten using the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Please see [Manual of Style] for help.

Urdū}}
Enlarge
Urdū}}

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

Taken by itself, Urdū 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.

Urdū 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 Urdū 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 .

Contents

Speakers and geographic distribution

There are between 60 and 80 million native speakers of standard Urdū (Khari Boli). Overall, besides the more than 160 million who speak Urdū in Pakistan, there is a considerable Indian population who communicate in Urdū everyday. According to the SIL ethnologue (1999 data), Hindi/Urdu is the fifth most spoken language in the world. According to Comerie (1998 data), Hindi-Urdu is the second most spoken language in the world, with 330 million native speakers.

Because of Urdū's extreme similarity to Hindi, speakers of the two languages can usually understand one another, if both sides refrain from using specialized vocabulary. Indeed, linguists sometimes count them as being part of the same language diasystem. However, Urdū and Hindi are socio-politically different, and people who self-describe as being speakers of Hindi would question their being counted as as native speakers of Urdū, and vice-versa.

In Pakistan, Urdū is spoken and understood by a majority of urban dwellers in such cities as Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi/Islamabad, Faisalabad, Hyderabad, Multan, Peshawar, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Sukkur and Sargodha. Urdū is used as the official language in all provinces of Pakistan. It is also taught as a compulsory language up to high school in both the English and Urdū medium school systems. This has produced millions of Urdū speakers whose mother tongue is one of the regional languages of Pakistan such as Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Balochi, Siraiki, Gujrati, and Brahui. Urdū is the lingua franca of Pakistan and is absorbing many words from regional languages of Pakistan. The regional languages are also being influenced by Urdū vocabulary. Most of the nearly five million Afghan refugees of different ethnic origins (such as Pakhtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Hazarvi, and Turkmen) who stayed in Pakistan for over twenty-five years have also become fluent in Urdū.

In India, Urdū is spoken in places where there are large Muslim majorities or cities which were bases for Muslim Empires in the past. These include parts of Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Bhopal, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Mysore. Some Indian schools teach Urdū as a first language and have their own syllabus and exams, Indian madrasahs also teach Arabic as well as Urdū. India has more than 2900 daily Urdū newspapers. Newspapers such as Daily Salar, Daily Pasban, Siasat Daily, Munsif Daily and Inqilab are published and distributed in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai.

Urdū is also spoken in Kashmir and urban Afghanistan. Outside South Asia, it is spoken by large numbers of workers in the major urban centers of the Persian Gulf countries and Saudi Arabia. Urdū is also spoken by large numbers of immigrants and their children in the major urban centers of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Norway and Australia.

Countries with large numbers of Urdū speakers:

Official status

Urdū is the national language of Pakistan. It shares official language status with English. Although English is used in most elite circles, and Punjabi has a plurality of native speakers, Urdū is the lingua franca and is expected to prevail. Urdū is also one of the official languages of India, and in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, and Uttar Pradesh, Urdū has official language status. While the government school system in most other states emphasises Standard Hindi, at universities in cities such as Lucknow, Aligarh and Hyderabad, Urdū is spoken and learned and is regarded as a language of prestige.

Urdu is also the language of 1 million Bangladeshi who are mainly descendants of their immigrant parents from India.

Classification and related languages

Urdū is a member of the Indo-Aryan family of languages (i.e., those languages descending from Sanskrit), which is in turn a branch of the Indo-Iranian branch (which comprises the Indo-Aryan and the Iranian branch), which itself is a branch of the Indo-European linguistic family. If Hindi and Urdū are considered to be same language (Hindustani (or Hindi- Nasta’liq alphabet, with names in the Devanagari and Latin alphabets" title="Urdū}} Nasta’liq alphabet, with names in the Devanagari and Latin alphabets" />

Enlarge
Urdū}} Nasta’liq alphabet, with names in the Devanagari and Latin alphabets

Note: This page contains IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for a pronunciation key.
Urdū is written in a derivative of the Persian alphabet, which is itself derivative of the Arabic alphabet. Like Semitic Languages, ." title="Urdū}}." />
Urdū}}.

Urdū has been the premiere language of poetry in South Asia for two centuries, and has developed a rich tradition in a variety of poetic genres. The 'Ghazal' in Urdū represents the most popular form of subjective poetry, while the 'Nazm' exemplifies the objective kind, often reserved for narrative, descriptive, didactic or satirical purposes. Under the broad head of the Nazm we may also include the classical forms of poems known by specific names such as 'Masnavi' (a long narrative poem in rhyming couplets on any theme: romantic, religious, or didactic), 'Marsia' (an elegy traditionally meant to commemorate the martyrdom of Hazrat Imam Hussain, grandson of Prophet Muhammad, and his comrades of the Karbala fame), or 'Qasida' (a panegyric written in praise of a king or a nobleman), for all these poems have a single presiding subject, logically developed and concluded. However, these poetic species have an old world aura about their subject and style, and are different from the modern Nazm, supposed to have come into vogue in the later part of the nineteenth century.

Foreign forms such as the sonnet, azad nazm (a.k.a Free verse) and haiku have also been used by some modern Urdū poets.

Probably the most widely recited, and memorised genre of contemporary Urdū poetry is naat—panegyric poetry written in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. Nāt can be of any formal category, but is most commonly in the ghazal form. The language used in Urdū nāt ranges from the intensely colloquial to a highly Persianised formal language. The great early twentieth century scholar Imam Ahmad Raza Khan, who wrote many of the most well known nāts in Urdū, epitomised this range in a ghazal of nine stanzas (bayt) in which every stanza contains half a line each of Arabic, Persian, formal Urdū, and colloquial Hindi. The same poet composed a salām—a poem of greeting to the Prophet Muhammad, derived from the unorthodox practice of qiyam, or standing, during the mawlid, or celebration of the birth of the Prophet—Mustafā Jān-e Rahmat, which, due to being recited on Fridays in some Urdū speaking mosques throughout the world, is probably the more frequently recited Urdū poems of the modern era.

Another important genre of Urdū prose are the poems commemorating the martyrdom of imam Hussain and Battle of Karbala, called noha (نوحہ) and marsia. Anees and Dabeer are famous in this regard.

Ash'ār (اشعار) (Couplet). It consists of two lines, Misra (مصرعہ); first line is called Misra-e-āla (مصرعہ اعلی) and the second is called 'Misra-e-sānī' (مصرعہ ثانی). Each verse embodies a single thought or subject (sing) She'r (شعر).

History

Urdū developed as local Indo-Aryan dialects came under the influence of the Muslim courts that ruled South Asia from the early thirteenth century. The official language of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and their successor states, as well as the cultured language of poetry and literature, was Persian, while the language of religion was Arabic. Most of the Sultans and nobility in the Sultanate period were Persianised Turks from Central Asia who spoke Turkish as their mother tongue. The Mughals were also Turks from Central Asia and spoke Persian as a second language. The mingling of these languages led to a vernacular that is the ancestor of today's Urdū}} language. Dialects of this vernacular are spoken today in cities and villages throughout Pakistan and northern India. Cities with a particularly strong tradition of Urdū include Hyderabad, Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, and Lucknow.

The birthplace of the Urdū language is not known with certainty. Urdū literature has a long Arabic history, however, and because of this it has strong middle eastern roots. The word Urdū itself comes from the Turkish word ordu, "tent" or "army", from which we get the word "horde". Hence Urdū is sometimes called "Lashkarī zabān" or the language of the army. Furthermore, armies of India often contained soldiers with various native tongues. Hence, Urdū was the chosen language to address the soldiers as it abridged several languages.

Wherever Muslim soldiers and officials settled, they carried Urdū with them. Urdū (along with Persian) enjoyed commanding status in the literary courts of Muslim rulers and Nawabs, and flourished under their patronage, partially displacing Sanskrit as the language of religious intellectuals in Indian society. The prestige bestowed upon Urdū at the expense of Sanskrit was a source of irritation for many religious Hindus, and to this day there remains religiously motivated conflict between the languages that sometimes makes dialogue difficult.

Urdū continued as one of many languages in Northwest India. In 1947, Urdū was established as the national language of the Islamic Republic of Pakistān in the hope that this move would unite and homogenise the various ethnic groups of the new nation. Urdū suddenly went from a language of a minority to the language of the majority. Today, Urdū is taught throughout Pakistāni schools and spoken in government positions, and it is also common in much of Northern India. Urdū's sister language, Hindī, is the official language of India.

Technically, linguists do not distinguish between Hindī and Urdū as separate languages. For them, Urdū and Hindī can be seen as variants of the same spoken language (Hindustānī) with Urdū being written in Perso-Arabic script and with a heavy Persian and Arabic vocabulary (cf. Webster's New World Dictionary). Both these languages are based on the Khariboli dialect—the dialect of the Delhi region. However, Standard Urdū and Standard Hindī are definitely distinct languages—for the purpose of politics and sociolinguistics-although in terms of mutual intelligibility, they would still be considered dialects of the same language. There are two fundamental distinctions between them:
  1. The source of borrowed vocabulary (Persian or Sanskrit), and the script used to write them (an adaptation of the Persian script written in Nasta'liq style, or the Devanagari alphabet). In colloquial situations in much of the Indian subcontinent, where neither learned vocabulary nor writing is used, the distinction between the Urdū and Hindī tends to zero. In other dialect areas, the distinction may become even more pronounced even in colloquial speech, for "Hindī" in such cases will often refer to the local dialect.
  2. The most important distinction at this level is in the script: if written in the Perso-Arabic script, the language is generally considered to be Urdū, and if written in Devanagari it is generally considered to be Hindi. Since the Partition of India, the formal registers used in education and the media in India have become increasingly divergent from Urdū in their vocabulary. Where there is no colloquial word for a concept, Standard Urdū uses Perso-Arabic vocabulary, while Standard Hindī uses Sanskrit vocabulary. This results in the official languages being heavily Sanskritised or Persianised, and unintelligible to speakers educated in the other standard (as far as the formal vocabulary is concerned).
Note that for the purpose of linguistics, neither of above two arguments qualify for the purpose of considering Hindī and Urdū to be separate languages. For example, English has about 80-90% of its technical and formal vocabulary coming from Latin (mostly through French). But this fact does not make English a Romance language (i.e., languages descending from Latin)—English is always considered to be a Germanic language, because its "common and everyday vocabulary" and grammar is based upon Old German. Script never causes distinction between languages, because linguistics deals with language as it is "spoken," regarding script as but choice construction.

It can be argued that Standard Hindī is a form of colloquial Hindustānī, intentionally de-Persianised and de-Arabicised, with its formal vocabulary borrowed instead from Sanskrit. Similarly, it can also be argued that Standard Urdū is also a form of Hindustānī, intentionally de-Sanskritised, with its formal vocabulary borrowed instead from Persian and Arabic.

These two standardised registers of Hindustānī have become so entrenched as separate languages that often nationalists, both Muslim and Hindu, claim that Hindī and Urdū have always been separate languages. However, there are unifying forces. For example, it is said that Indian Bollywood films are made in "Hindī", but the language used in most of them is almost the same as that of Urdū speakers. The dialogue is frequently developed in English and later translated to an intentionally neutral Hindustānī which can be easily understood by speakers of most speakers of most North Indian languages, both in India and in Pakistan.

Also see Hindi.

The Indian film industry based in Mumbai is often called Bollywood. The language used in Bollywood films is often called Hindī, but most dialogues are actually written in Hindustānī -- they can be understood by Urdū and Hindī speakers alike. The film industry wants to reach the largest possible audience, and it cannot do that if the dialogue of the film is too one-sidedly Hindī or Urdū.#redirect This rule is broken only for song lyrics, which use elevated, poetic language. Often, this means using poetic Urdū words, of Arabic and Persian origin. A few films, like Umrao Jaan, Pakeezah, and Mughal-e-azam, have used vocabulary that leans more towards Urdū, as they depict places and times when Urdū would have been used.

From the 1950s through the 1970s, Bollywood films displayed the name of the film in Hindī, Urdū, and Roman scripts. Most Bollywood films today present film titles in Roman {{Unicode, although some also include the Hindī and Urdū scripts.

Urdenglish

There is a tendency to use English words and expressions in Urdū speech in Pakistan. This mixture is popularly known as Urdenglish. According to Khalid Ahmed of Daily Times [link] :

:Those who speak Urdū sabotage it with colourless English words. The so-called ‘English-medium’ community does it all the time. So do most politicians. Asked to speak only in Urdū most of us go into contortions of unease. But the unkindest cut of all is that our great creative writers in Urdū too can’t speak Urdū for a minute without plastering us with ordinary not-too-original English expressions.

Footnote

1As in Ghalib's famous couplet[link] where he compares himself to his great predecessor, the master poet Mir :

: ریختے کے تمہیں استاد نہیں ہو غالب : کہتے ہیں اگلے زمانے میں کوئی میر بھی تھا

Transliteration

:Rekhte ke tumhen ustād nahīn ho Ghālib :Kahte hain agle zamāne men ko'ī Mīr bhī thā

Translation

:You, alone, are not the only expert of 'Rekhta', Ghalib :It is said that even once there existed someone named Mir

Bibliography/References

Bhatia, Tej K. and Koul Ashok. (2000). "Colloquial Urdu: The Complete Course for Beginners." London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-13540-0 (Book); ISBN 0-415-13541-9 (cassette); ISBN 0-415-13542-7 (book and casseettes course)

* Asher, R. E. (Ed.). (1994). The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon Press. ISBN 0-0803-5943-4. * Azad, Muhammad Husain: Ab-e hayat (Lahore: Naval Kishor Gais Printing Wrks) 1907 [in Urdu] (Delhi: Oxford University Press) 2001 [In English translation] * Azim, Anwar. (1975). Urdu a victim of cultural genocide. In Z. Imam (Ed.), Muslims in India (p. 259). *Bhatia, Tej K. Colloquial Hindi: The Complete Course for Beginners. London, UK & New York, NY: Routledge, 1996. ISBN 0415110874 (Book), 0415110882 (Cassettes), 0415110890 (Book & Cassette Course) * Chatterji, Suniti K. (1960). Indo-Aryan and Hindi (rev. 2nd ed.). Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay. * Dua, Hans R. (1992). Hindi-Urdu as a pluricentric language. In M. G. Clyne (Ed.), Pluricentric languages: Differing norms in different nations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3-1101-2855-1. * Dua, Hans R. (1994b). Urdu. In Asher (Ed.) (pp. 4863-4864). * Dua, Hans R. (1994a). Hindustani. In Asher (Ed.) (pp. 1554). * Kelkar, A. R. (1968). ''Studies in Hindi-Urdu: Introduction and word phonology. Poona: Deccan College. * Khan, M. H. (1969). Urdu. In T. A. Sebeok (Ed.), Current trends in linguistics (Vol. 5). The Hague: Mouton. * Narang, G. C.; & Becker, D. A. (1971). Aspiration and nasalization in the generative phonology of Hindi-Urdu. Language, 47, 646-767. * Ohala, M. (1972). Topics in Hindi-Urdu phonology. (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles). * ["A Desertful of Roses"], a site about Ghalib's Urdū ghazals by Dr. Frances W. Pritchett, Professor of Modern Indic Languages at Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. * Rai, Amrit. (1984). A house divided: The origin and development of Hindi-Hindustani. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-1956-1643-X. *Snell, Rupert Teach yourself Hindi: A complete guide for beginners. Lincolnwood, IL : NTC

See also

has more about this subject:
alphabetically arranged *Ghazal *Hindustani *India *Languages of India *Languages of Pakistan *List of {{Unicode *Muhajir *Pakistan *Persian and {{Unicode *{{Unicode *{{Unicode *List of {{Unicode

External links

Sites About *[Urdū dictionary] Free Online Urdū dictionary tool. *[Urdū Poetry,Funny Poetry:] Having Great Resources of Urdū Poetry,Hamd,Naat,Mizah,News etc... *[Only Urdū Stuff] Urdū Stuff lot of content about urdū lanuage all the is written in urdū language image graphic form having urdū poetry, urdū news, urdū dictionary and many more. *[Urdū Through Hindi: Nastaliq With the Help of Devanagari] *[Daily Jang - South Asia's most widely read Urdū newspaper] *[1st complete monthly Urdū online magazine:] Having Great Resources of Computer information, Urdū Stories, Urdū Poetry,Hamd,Naat,etc... *[TheUrduLanguage.com Urdū History] *[CRULP] Center for research in Urdū language processing *[Urdustan.com : oldest Urdū language website] *[Introductory Urdū (Volume 1)] *[Introductory Urdū (Volume 2)] *[Hindi-Urdū-Pashtu-English Word list:] Comparative list of 210 words in English, Hindi/Urdū, and Pashtu/Pashto/Pukhtu *[Urdū Wiktionary] *[Dinesh Prabhu's Urdū Dictionary:] Includes Grammar, Word Origins, and more *[Wikitravel Hindi-Urdū Phrasebook] *[History of Urdū Literature] *[NeoSense Urdū Extension for Ligature Parsing]

Online Use of *[Urdū Jokes]Online Urdū Jokes Collection. *[Funny Poetry] Urdū Funny Poetry - Fun & Joy Stop in urdū website *[Urdū Hamd & Naat] *[Urdū Poetry,Funny Poetry:] Having Great Resources of Urdū Poetry,Hamd,Naat,Mizah,News etc... *[Urdū Poetry] One of the largest urdū poetry collection by users and own contibution. *[Urdū Poetry:] User submitted poetry in Roman Urdū *[Webster's Urdū-English Dictionary] *[Online Dictionary] *[Urdū:] Digital Library of Urdū Books. Allama Iqbal Urdū Cyber Library Network *[Shairy.com:] Largest collection of Online Urdū poetry,Urdū Shairee, S[link]Shairy,News,Colums,And every thing who wants By you *[Urdū Jokes] Free Online Urdū Jokes. *[Al Qamar Online Urdū Network from London] *[UrdūWiki] *[Collaborative blog discussing the Urdū language and the affiliated culture] *[Blogging In Urdū] *[List of blogs in Urdū] *[Templates for blogging in Urdū] *[BBC News in Urdū] *[Al-Islam.org in Urdū] *[Roznama Boriat Karachi] - Spoof News in Urdū *[Urdū Public Library] - Urdū Public Library *[Urdū-Poetry:] Urdū Poetry books. From funny Urdū poetry to sad Urdū petry, Indian Urdū poetry to Pakistani Urdū poetry and even male/female Urdū poetry. Read now *[Urdū News] Online urdū new paper Updated daily, in graphical form. *[Sufi Urdū online Magazine]
Indo-Iranian languages
Indo-Aryan Varieties of Sanskrit: Vedic Sanskrit - Classical Sanskrit | Angika | Assamese | Bengali | Bhojpuri | Dhivehi | Dogri | Gujarati | Hindi | Hindustani | Konkani | Magadhi | Mahl | Maithili | Marathi | Nepali | Oriya | Pāli | Prakrit | Punjabi | Romani | Sindhi | Sinhala | Urdu
Iranian languages>Iranian Avestan | Varieties of Persian: Old Persian - Middle Persion (Pahlavi) - Modern Persian (Fārsī) - Darī (Afghanistan) - Tājikī | Bactrian | Balochi | Dari (Zoroastrianism) | Gilaki | Kurdish | Mazandarani | Ossetic | Pamiri | Pashto | Saka | Scythian | Sogdian | Talysh | Tat | Yagnobi
Dardic languages>Dardic Dameli | Domaaki | Gawar-Bati | Kalasha | Kashmiri | Khowar | Kohistani | Nangalami | Pashayi | Palula | Shina | Shumashti
Nuristani languages>Nuristani Ashkun | Kamviri | Kati | Prasuni | Tregami | Waigali

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: