Hindi and Urdu are generally considered to be one spoken language with two different literary traditions. That means that Hindi and Urdu speakers who shop in the same markets have no problems understanding each other -- they'd both say yeh kitne kaa hay for 'How much is it? ' -- but the written form for Hindi will be यह कितने का है? And the Urdu one will be یہ کتنے کا ہے؟ Hindi is written from left to right in the Devanagari script, and is the official language of India, along with English. Urdu, on the other hand, is written from right to left in the Nastaliq script and is the national language of Pakistan. It's also one of the official languages of the Indian states of Bihar and Jammu & Kashmir.
Considered as one, these tongues constitute the second most spoken language in the world, sometimes called Hindustani. In their daily lives, Hindi and Urdu speakers communicate in their 'different' languages without major problems. Both Hindi and Urdu developed from Classical Sanskrit, which appeared in the Indus Valley at about the start of the Common Era. The first old Hindi poetry was written in the year 769 AD, and by the European Middle Ages it became known as 'Hindvi'.
Muslim Turks invaded the Punjab in 1027 and took control of Delhi in 1193. They paved the way for the Islamic Mughal Empire, which ruled northern India from the 16th century until it was defeated by the British Raj in the mid-19th century. It was at this time that the language of this book began to take form, a mixture of Hindvi grammar with Arabic, Persian and Turkish vocabulary. The Muslim speakers of Hindvi began to write in the Arabic script, creating Urdu, while the Hindu population incorporated the new words but continued to write in Devanagari script.
Try reading some poetry from Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Ahmad Faraz . Indians mix alot of hindhi words with urdu which I get but then to say that they speak urdu is not accurate. And the place where urdu is spoken in india is not a majority either. So majority of your people if they even know urdu speak with an accent.
Like most of the indian people who answer questions in the urdu section. My point of saying that is that youre saying that Punjabis have an accent but indians pronounce so many things wrong. Punjabis have to study Urdu and urdu poetry just like everyone else and they do not have an accent when they speak urdu. Something you do not have in India unless you speacialize in it. The Punjabis in the villages who speak urdu are like Scottish people who speak English.That is not the correct accent of urdu. Im sure the part of India whose native language is urdu speak it perfectly.
Thats why the person said Indian urdu is not real urdu. Because the MAJORITY since others aparently dont count speak with an accent and their own words. Because the city where its originated have good urdu.
And idk why youre ignoring all the rest of Pakistanis. Just like the rest of the people in karachi where Im from. Hope my city with 21.2 million people exists for you since its not panjabi.
In India, although Urdu is not and never was used exclusively by Muslims , the ongoing Hindi–Urdu controversy and modern cultural association of each language with the two religions has led to fewer Hindus using Urdu. In part because the Pakistani government proclaimed Urdu the national language at Partition, the Indian state and some religious nationalists began to regard Urdu as a 'foreign' language, to be viewed with suspicion. Urdu, which was often referred to by the British administrators in India as the Hindustani language, was promoted in colonial India by British policies to counter the previous emphasis on Persian. Urdu replaced Persian as the official language of India in 1837 and was made co-official, along with English.
In the Delhi region of India the native language was Khariboli, whose earliest form is known as Old Hindi . It belongs to the Western Hindi group of the Central Indo-Aryan languages. The contact of the Hindu and Muslim cultures during the period of Islamic conquests and in the Indian subcontinent led to the development of Hindustani as a product of a composite Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb.
In cities such as Delhi, the Indian language Old Hindi began to acquire many Persian loanwords and continued to be called "Hindi" and later, also "Hindustani". In southern India , a form of the language flourished in medieval India and is known as Dakhini, which contains loanwords from Telugu and Marathi. An early literary tradition of Hindavi was founded by Amir Khusrau in the late 13th century. From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century the language now known as Urdu was called Hindi, Hindavi, Hindustani, Dehlavi, Lahori, and Lashkari. The name Urdu was first introduced by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780. As a literary language, Urdu took shape in courtly, elite settings.
While Urdu retained the grammar and core Indo-Aryan vocabulary of the local Indian dialect Khariboli, it adopted the Nastaleeq writing system – which was developed as a style of Persian calligraphy. Even Sanskrit is also not a Indian language, because Sanskrit speaking nomadic people's who entered in India before first century by with their cattle. Later where ever they join with original Indians they learned the local languages and the written the books in Dravidian languages like Tamil, Telugu and Kannada only. Later 5th century only from the Dravidian languages called Sanskrit is developed and later by 12th century they kept the name Deva nagary. Thus a mixed language developed during turkic , pathan , and mughal rulers.
Sindhi, balochi, punjabi, and kpk people all have their own spoken language. And hyderabad and other places are urdu speakers.however all native people of pakistan use farsi script. Some who are from a non-Urdu background now can read and write only Urdu. With such a large number of people speaking Urdu, the language has acquired a peculiar Pakistani flavour further distinguishing it from the Urdu spoken by native speakers, resulting in more diversity within the language.
In 1973, Urdu was recognised as the sole national language of Pakistan – although English and regional languages were also granted official recognition. @Tarun-Hyderabadi, typical indian negation of a separate pakistani identity. I am sorry urdu is the national language of pakistan and the lingua franca of pakistan .
It is therefore natural that urdu is taught by those who hail from the country where it is a national language rather than a provincial language with an embattled status even in the provinces in which it originally developed. @Alishba, Its about time to get over this view that Urdu is a language foreign to Pakistan. Urdu is the national language and it is the most widely understood language in the country and it has deep roots in South Asia. Pakistan's greatest national poets have written in Urdu. It is time to start thinking like a nation instead of letting regional prejudices destroy our unity.
We can be proud of our regional languages but we must also be proud of our national language Urdu. By the way the centre of Urdu literature and poetry is no longer Lucknow but Lahore. Hindi is the official language of the Republic of India and the most widely spoken language in South Asia. Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, one of the official languages of India, and a tremendously important strategic language in South Asia. With a common vocabulary and grammar, in their basic form, Hindi and Urdu are generally considered to be the same language written in two different scripts. Worldwide, there are over 65 million speakers of Urdu--mainly in India and Pakistan, but also in numerous diasporic communities.
Since Urdu is written in the Perso-Arabic script, as are the other written languages of Pakistan, learning Urdu facilitates access to these other languages as well. In practice, these guarantees meant very little for Urdu-speaking people. Urdu was born in India and Islam has nothing to do with it. Precisely how could Urdu-speaking people conserve their culture when soon after independence their mother tongue was banished from primary schools? Throughout the large areas of northern and central India , Urdu was virtually removed as a medium of instruction in schools.
The Urdu language is one of the most beautiful sounding languages you can learn, and it is why Urdu is still a preferred medium of poetry and prose even by non-native speakers. It is enriched with history, culture, and religious influences, giving birth to some of the best literary and poetic works responsible for the socio-political, moral, and spiritual development of the South Asian region. Historically, Hindustani developed in the post-12th century period under the impact of the incoming Afghans and Turks as a linguistic modus vivendi from the sub-regional apabhramshas of north-western India. Its first major folk poet was the great Persian master, Amir Khusrau (1253–1325), who is known to have composed dohas and riddles in the newly-formed speech, then called 'Hindavi'. Through the medieval time, this mixed speech was variously called by various speech sub-groups as 'Hindavi', 'Zaban-e-Hind', 'Hindi', 'Zaban-e-Dehli', 'Rekhta', 'Gujarii. 'Dakkhani', 'Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla', 'Zaban-e-Urdu', or just 'Urdu'.
By the late 11th century, the name 'Hindustani' was in vogue and had become the lingua franca for most of northern India. A sub-dialect called Khari Boli was spoken in and around Delhi region at the start of 13th century when the Delhi Sultanate was established. Khari Boli gradually became the prestige dialect of Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) and became the basis of modern Standard Hindi & Urdu. No region in Pakistan uses Urdu as its mother tongue, though it is spoken as the first language of Muslim migrants in Pakistan who left India after independence in 1947. Urdu was chosen as a symbol of unity for the new state of Pakistan in 1947, because it had already served as a lingua franca among Muslims in north and northwest British India.
It is written, spoken and used in all provinces/territories of Pakistan, although the people from differing provinces may have different native languages. South Asian Muslims have long felt that Urdu symbolizes their shared identity. It has served as a link among educated Muslims and was stressed in the Pakistan independence movement. However, because many of the elite were fluent in English, English became the de facto national language. The push to elevate Urdu was unpopular in East Pakistan, where most of the population speaks Bengali and identifies with its literary heritage.
Urdu as a language evolved during the last days of the Mughal rule in India. Persian was the official language of the Mughal emperors along with Turkic and Arabic. At that time, the northern part of India was the centre of rule and knowledge, particularly Delhi and its surrounding areas, including today's Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Due to the interaction of local population and the ruling Persian-Turkic-speaking Muslim elite, a new language evolved and was known as Hindustani. So, Urdu became one of the signs of era of prosperity and power of the Muslims in this sub-continent. SOON after the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, especially after India had taken Hindi as the official language, central leaders of Pakistan wanted Urdu to be the sole state language of entire Pakistan.
This is a decision which had been strongly opposed by the people of East Pakistan. With the utmost surprise of the history of the language movement, Urdu itself has never been the most widely spoken language of Pakistan till now. During the movement, it was the language of only 7 per cent of the total population of Pakistan while Bangla accounted for 54 per cent.The mother tongue of most of the West Pakistanis were Panjabi, Pashtu, Sindhi, Balochi and so on.
The religious revivals of the 19th century have to be examined in the wider context of the anti-colonial freedom movement of the 20th century. The Indian National Congress claimed to represent all Indians irrespective of religion. It declared Hindustani, the common vernacular of north India with the Devanagari and Persian scripts, as the national language of a future independent, united India. The All-India Muslim League rejected the INC's claim to represent all Indians. Instead, the Muslim League, as it has come to be known, claimed to represent all Indian Muslims. It rejected Hindustani as the national language and declared Urdu to be the official language of Indian Muslims.
More shocking were legislations in many states which made it an offence for government servants to use any language other than Hindi. In May 1948, the UP government issued a circular which stated that the children would be educated using Hindi exclusively. But in 1949, an important resolution was adopted at the Provincial Education Ministers' Conference, which was also approved by the Union government. Hindi and Urdu are considered to be the national language of their respective countries, but it is often not the native language of its people. Both Hindi and Urdu are taught in school due to their status as official languages. In India, both Hindi and Urdu have an agency that regulates the language; meanwhile, Urdu is the only language being regulated in Pakistan.
The diverse linguistic heritage of Nepal stems from various language groups including Tibeto-Burman, Indo-Aryan, and numerous indigenous dialects. According to the 2011 census, about 2.6% of the residents were Urdu speakers. The official language of Nepal is Nepali, while Urdu is a registered regional dialect of Nepal. Some of the local dialects spoken in the southern Madhesh area include Urdu, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, and Maithili.
Is Urdu Pakistani Hindi is the official language of Central Government in India. India has more than 22 officially recognized national languages and 1600+ sub level as well as ethnicity based languages specific to different regions and there respective governing bodies. Republic of India is a Federation as well as a nation state. No one imposes anyone's language on the other but everyone is expected to respect the systematic order of the Nation while enjoying their civil rights to their own languages and native cultures. Mutual intelligibility decreases in literary and specialised contexts that rely on academic or technical vocabulary. In a longer conversation, differences in formal vocabulary and pronunciation of some Urdu phonemes are noticeable, though many native Hindi speakers also pronounce these phonemes.
At a phonological level, speakers of both languages are frequently aware of the Perso-Arabic or Sanskrit origins of their word choice, which affects the pronunciation of those words. Urdu speakers will often insert vowels to break up consonant clusters found in words of Sanskritic origin, but will pronounce them correctly in Arabic and Persian loanwords. As a result of religious nationalism since the partition of British India and continued communal tensions, native speakers of both Hindi and Urdu frequently assert that they are distinct languages. Urdu is the sole national, and one of the two official languages of Pakistan . It is spoken and understood throughout the country, whereas the state-by-state languages are the provincial languages, although only 7.57% of Pakistanis speak Urdu as their first language. Its official status has meant that Urdu is understood and spoken widely throughout Pakistan as a second or third language.
It is used in education, literature, office and court business, although in practice, English is used instead of Urdu in the higher echelons of government. Article 251 of the Pakistani Constitution mandates that Urdu be implemented as the sole language of government, though English continues to be the most widely used language at the higher echelons of Pakistani government. Owing to interaction with other languages, Urdu has become localised 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 flavour.
Similarly, the Urdu spoken in India can also be distinguished into many dialects such as the Standard Urdu of Lucknow and Delhi, as well as the Dakhni of South India. Because of Urdu's similarity to Hindi, speakers of the two languages can easily understand one another if both sides refrain from using literary vocabulary. Hindi and Urdu both originated in Delhi and have roots in Sanskrit. After the Muslim conquest by Central Asian invaders in the 11th and 12th centuries, the new rulers learned the local tongue.
These rulers spoke Persian and Turkish and wrote their languages in the Arabic Nastaliq script, so when they started speaking Hindi-Urdu they wrote this new language in the Nastaliq script as well. By the 16th century, it had developed into a dialect of its own termed Urdu with a prominent literary culture revolving around the royal court. Although Urdu is the official national language, it is spoken as a native tongue by only 8 percent of the population. People who speak Urdu as their native language generally identify themselves as muhajirs. A large number of people from educated backgrounds speak Urdu, as opposed to their natal languages, in their homes, usually to help their children master it.
Thank you for this excellent article and pointing out the lack of good teaching tools for learning Urdu as a second language. I think the point you make about racist and discriminatory content in Urdu teaching tools is also very important - I wonder how we can change this systematically. I think the Government has an important role to play. Frankly even students in Pakistan have a very hard time learning Urdu.
