Chapter 1: Urdu and Urdu Script

Urdu

Urdu and Hindi are sister languages and belong to the Indo-Aryan language family. The word “Urdu” is a Turkish word which means “camp/barracks”. Urdu is recognized as the national language of Pakistan and one of the 22 officially recognized languages in the constitution of India. Basic conversational Hindi and Urdu appear to be the same language along with their grammatical structures. Gradually, effects of Arabic- and Persian-borrowing in Urdu, and Sanskrit-borrowing in Hindi, are very visible at the lexical level. One major difference between Urdu and Hindi is script. Hindi uses Devanagari script, whereas Urdu uses Arabic script with a few modifications to match Hindustani speech. Today, about 60 million people speak Urdu in Pakistan, India, and elsewhere. If we combine the population of Urdu and Hindi speakers, it makes the second-largest spoken language in the world.