Urdu

Overview
Urdu —or, more precisely, Modern Standard Urdu—is a Persianised standardregister of the Hindustani language. It is the official national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. In India, it is one of the 22 official languages recognized in the Constitution of India, having official status in the six states of Jammu and Kashmir, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal, as well as the national capital territory of Delhi. It is a registered regional language of Nepal.

Apart from specialized vocabulary, spoken Urdu is mutually intelligible with Standard Hindi, another recognized register of Hindustani. The Urdu variant of Hindustani received recognition and patronage under British rule when the British replaced the local official languages with English and Hindustani written in Nastaʿlīq script, as the official language in North and Northwestern India. Religious, social, and political factors pushed for a distinction between Urdu and Hindi in India, leading to the Hindi–Urdu controversy.

According to Nationalencyklopedin's 2010 estimates, Urdu is the 21st most spoken first language in the world, with approximately 66 million speakers. According to Ethnologue's 2017 estimates, Urdu, along with standard Hindi and the languages of the Hindi belt (as Hindustani), is the 3rd most spoken language in the world, with approximately 329.1 million native speakers, and 697.4 million total speakers.

Origin
Urdu, like Hindi, is a form of Hindustani. It evolved from the medieval (6th to 13th century) Apabhraṃśa register of the preceding Shauraseni language, a Middle Indo-Aryan language that is also the ancestor of other modern Indo-Aryan languages, including the Punjabi dialects. Around 75% of Urdu words have their etymological roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit, and approximately 99% of Urdu verbs have their roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit. Because Persian-speaking sultans ruled the Indian subcontinent for a number of years, Urdu was influenced by Persian and to a lesser extent, Arabic, which have contributed to about 25% of Urdu's vocabulary. Although the word Urdu is derived from the Turkic word ordu (army) or orda, from which English hordeis also derived, Turkic borrowings in Urdu are minimal and Urdu is also not genetically related to the Turkic languages. Urdu words originating from Chagatai and Arabic were borrowed through Persian and hence are Persianized versions of the original words. Nevertheless, contrary to popular belief, Urdu did not borrow from the Turkish language, but from Chagatai, a Turkic language from Central Asia. Urdu and Turkish borrowed from Arabic and Persian, hence the similarity in pronunciation of many Urdu and Turkish words.

Arabic influence in the region began with the late first-millennium Muslim conquests of the Indian subcontinent. The Persian language was introduced into the subcontinent a few centuries later by various Persianized Central Asian Turkic and Afghan dynasties including that of Mahmud of Ghazni. The Turko-Afghan Delhi Sultanate established Persian as its official language, a policy continued by the Mughal Empire, which extended over most of northern South Asia from the 16th to 18th centuries and cemented Persian influence on the developing Hindustani.

The name Urdu was first used by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780. From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century Urdu was commonly known as Hindi. The language was also known by various other names such as Hindavi and Dehlavi. Hindustani in Persian script was used by Muslims and Hindus, but was current chiefly in Muslim influenced society. The communal nature of the language lasted until it replaced Persian as the official language in 1837 and was made co-official, along with English. Hindustani was promoted in British India by British policies to counter the previous emphasis on Persian. This triggered a Hindu backlash in northwestern India, which argued that the language should be written in the native Devanagari script. This literary standard called "Hindi" replaced Urdu as the official language of Bihar in 1881, establishing a sectarian divide of "Urdu" for Muslims and "Hindi" for Hindus, a divide that was formalized with the division of India and Pakistan after independence (though there are Hindu poets who continue to write in Urdu to this day, with post-independence examples including Gopi Chand Narang and Gulzar).

There have been attempts to "purify" Urdu and Hindi, by purging Urdu of Sanskrit words, and Hindi of Persian loanwords, and new vocabulary draws primarily from Persian and Arabic for Urdu and from Sanskrit for Hindi. English has exerted a heavy influence on both as a co-official language.

Speaker
There are over 100 million native speakers of Urdu in India (more than 80% of it) and Pakistan together: there were 52 million and 80.5 million Urdu speakers in India some 5% and 6.5% of the total population of India as per the 2001 and 2011 censuses respectively; approximately 10 million in Pakistan or 7.57% as per the 1998 census and 16 million in 2006 estimates; and several hundred thousand in the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, United States, and Bangladesh (where it is called "Bihari"). However, a knowledge of Urdu allows one to speak with far more people than that, because Hindustani, of which Urdu is one variety, is the third most commonly spoken language in the world, after Mandarin and English. Because of the difficulty in distinguishing between Urdu and Hindi speakers in India and Pakistan, as well as estimating the number of people for whom Urdu is a second language, the estimated number of speakers is uncertain and controversial.

Owing to interaction with other languages, Urdu has become localized wherever it is spoken, including in Pakistan. Urdu in Pakistan has undergone changes and has incorporated and borrowed many words from regional languages, thus allowing speakers of the language in Pakistan to distinguish themselves more easily and giving the language a decidedly Pakistani flavor. Similarly, the Urdu spoken in India can also be distinguished into many dialects like Dakhni (Deccan) of South India, and Khariboli of the Punjab region. Because of Urdu's similarity to Hindi, speakers of the two languages can easily understand one another if both sides refrain from using specialized vocabulary. The syntax (grammar), morphology, and the core vocabulary are essentially identical. Thus linguists usually count them as one single language and contend that they are considered as two different languages for socio-political reasons

In Pakistan, Urdu is mostly learned as a second or a third language as nearly 93% of Pakistan's population has a native language other than Urdu. Despite this, Urdu was chosen as a token of unity and as a lingua franca so as not to give any native Pakistani language preference over the other. Urdu is therefore spoken and understood by the vast majority in some form or another. It is written, spoken and used in all provinces/territories of Pakistan although the people from differing provinces may have different indigenous languages, as from the fact that it is the "base language" of the country. For this reason, it is also taught as a compulsory subject up to higher secondary school in both English and Urdu medium school systems. This has produced millions of Urdu speakers from people whose native language is one of the other languages of Pakistan, who can read and write only Urdu. It is absorbing many words from the regional languages of Pakistan. This variation of Urdu is sometimes referred to as Pakistani Urdu.

Although most of the population is conversant in Urdu, it is the first language of only an estimated 7% of the population who are mainly Muslim immigrants (known as Muhajir in Pakistan) from different parts of South Asia. The regional languages are also being influenced by Urdu vocabulary. There are millions of Pakistanis whose native language is not Urdu, but because they have studied in Urdu medium schools, they can read and write Urdu along with their native language. Most of the nearly five million Afghan refugees of different ethnic origins (such as Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Hazarvi, and Turkmen) who stayed in Pakistan for over twenty-five years have also become fluent in Urdu. With such a large number of people(s) speaking Urdu, the language has acquired a peculiar Pakistani flavour further distinguishing it from the Urdu spoken by native speakers and diversifying the language even further.

In India, Urdu is spoken in places where there are large Muslim minorities or cities that were bases for Muslim Empires in the past. Some Indian schools teach Urdu as a first language and have their own syllabi and exams. Indian madrasahs also teach Arabic as well as Urdu. India has more than 3,000 Urdu publications, including 405 daily Urdu newspapers.

Outside South Asia, it is spoken by large numbers of migrant South Asian workers in the major urban centers of the Persian Gulf countries. Urdu is also spoken by large numbers of immigrants and their children in the major urban centers of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Germany, Norway, and Australia. Along with Arabic, Urdu is among the immigrant languages with the most speakers in Catalonia.

Urdu excerpt from Wikipedia article "اردو"
اردو ہندی زبان کی طرح ہندوستانی زبان کی ایک قسم ہے۔ یہ شوراسنی زبان (یہ زبان وسطی ہند آریائی زبان تھی جو موجودہ کئی زبانوں کی بنیاد سمجھی جاتی ہے، ان میں پنجابی زبان بھی شامل ہے) کی ذیلی قسم اپ بھرنش سے قرون وسطٰی (چھٹی سے تیرہویں صدی) کے درمیان وجود میں آئی۔

اگرچہ لفظ اردو بذات خود ترک زبان کے لفظ اوردو (لشکر، فوج) یا اوردا سے نکلا ہے، اسی سے انگریزی لفظ کا ظہور ہوا۔ ترک زبان سے اردو میں کم ہی الفاظ آئے ہیں۔ ٍعرب ،ترک الفاظ اردو میں پہنچ کر فارسی قسم کے بن گئے ہیں جیسے ة کو اکثر اوقات ه میں بدل دیا جاتا ہے۔ مثلاً عربی تائے مربوطہ (ة) کو (ہ) یا (ت) میں بدل دیا جاتا ہے۔

عربی کا اس خطے میں عمل دخل اس وقت شروع ہوا جب پہلے ہزار سال کے آخری دور میں عربوں نے برصغیر کے کچھ علاقوں میں بطور فاتح قدم جمایا۔ جبکہ کچھ صدیوں بعد وسطی ایشیا کے افغان ترک فارسی متکلم باشاہوں نے فارسی زبان کو اس خطے میں متعارف کرایا، ان بادشاہوں میں سلطان محمود غزنوی قابل ذکر ہیں۔ دلی کی ترک افغان سلطنت نے سب سے پہلے فارسی کو شمالی ہندوستان کی دفتری زبان قرار دیا پھر ان کی پیروی کرتے ہوئے مغلوں نے بھی اسے سولہویں سے اٹھارویں صدی تک اسی حالت میں برقرار رکھا، یوں صدیوں تک فارسی زبان نے جنوبی ایشیا میں اپنے قدم مضبوطی سے جمائے رکھے۔ اس طرح اس نے ہندوستانی کی ترقی میں اہم کردار ادا کیا۔

اردو زبان کو ہندوستان کے مسلمانوں کے ساتھ خاص کیا جاتا ہے اور اسی حوالے سے کئی نظریات بھی قائم کیے گئے ہیں۔ ممتاز محقق حافظ محمود شیرانی کے نزدیک یہ زبان محمود غزنوی کے حملہ ہندوستان کے ادوار میں پنجاب میں پیدا ہوئی جب فارسی بولنے والے سپاہی پنجاب میں بس گئے نیز ان کے نزدیک یہ فارسی متکلمین دو سو سال تک دہلی فتح کرنے سے قبل وہاں آباد رہے، یوں پنجابی اور فارسی زبانوں کے اختلاط نے اردو کو جنم دیا پھر ایک آدھ صدی بعد جب اس نئی زبان کا آدھا گندھا خمیر دہلی پہنچا تب وہاں اس نے مکمل زبان کی صورت اختیار کی اس حوالے سے انھوں نے پنجابی اور اردو زبان میں کئی مماثلتیں بھی پیش کی ہیں۔ (سندھ جسے مسلمانوں نے اس سے بھی قبل فتح کیا کے متعلق ان کا خیال ہے کہ وہاں مسلمانوں نے مقامی زبان نہیں اپنائی)۔ شیرانی کے اسی نظریہ کو "پنجاب میں اردو" نامی مقالے میں لکھا گیا جس نے اردو زبان دانوں میں کافی شہرت پائی اور اسی کو دیکھ کر بہت سے محققین نے مسلمانوں کی آمد سے اردو کے آغاز کو جوڑنا شروع کیا اس طرح "دکن میں اردو"، "گجرات میں اردو"، "سندھ میں اردو"، "بنگال میں اردو "حتیٰ کہ "بلوچستان میں اردو" کے بھی نظریات سامنے آئے۔ (حقیقتاً شیرانی سے قبل بھی بعض محققین جیسے سنیت کمار چترجی، محی الدین قادری زور اردو پنجابی تعلق کے بارے میں ایسے خیالات رکھتے تھے البتہ اسے ثابت کرنے میں وہ دوسروں سے بازی لے گئے) حافظ شیرانی کے نظریہ کی مخالفت کرنے والوں میں مسعود حسین خان اور سبزواری جیسے محققین شامل ہیں جنہوں نے ان کے نظریے کو غلط ثابت کیا۔ ایک نظریہ یہ بھی مشہور ہے کہ اردو مغل بادشاہ اکبر کے لشکر میں وجود آئی لیکن بہت سے ماہرین لسانیات اس کی نفی کرتے ہیں۔