Urdu

Introduction

Urd belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European language family. It is spoken as a first language by 11 million people in in Pakistan and by 48 million people in India. It is also spoken in urban Afghanistan, in the major urban centers of the Persian Gulf countries and Saudi Arabia.Urd is also spoken by Pakistani immigrants in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Norway and Australia. The worldwide population of speakers of Urd as a first language is estimated at 60.5 million people, together with second-language speakers, the number is 104 million (Ethnologue).

Pakistan The name Hindi is of Persian origin. The Persians used it to refer to the Indian people and to the languages they spoke. Scholars postulate that Hindi developed in the 8th-10th centuries during the period of Islamic invasions of northern India from khari boli , the speech around Dehli which was adopted by the Moslem invaders to communicate with the local population. Eventually, it developed into a variety called Urd(from Turkish ordu 'camp'), characterized by numerous borrowings from Persian and Arabic, which became a literary language. In the meantime, the language of the indigenous population remained relatively free of borrowings from Persian and Arabic, and instead borrowed words and literary conventions from Sanskrit. This Pakistan language became Hindi.

As a result of these different influences, Hindi is written in the Devanagari script and draws much of its vocabulary from Sanskrit, while Urd is written in the Persian script and draws a great deal of its lexicon from Persian and Arabic. The two languages also differ in a number of relatively minor ways in their Pakistan sound system and grammar. Both Hindi and Urd have been used as literary languages starting in the 12th century. Under the influence of English, Hindi and Urd literature flourished starting in the 18th century.

Hindi and Urd have a common colloquial form, called Hindustani. Hindustani never achieved the status of a literary language, although Mahatma Ghandi used it as a symbol of national unity during Indias struggle for independence from England.

Pakistan
Urd is the official language of Pakistan, along with English. It is the 2nd or 3rd language for those Pakistanis for whom it is not a native language. All government, business, media, and education are conducted in Urd.

India
Urd is also one of the official languages of India, and has official status in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, and Uttar Pradesh where it is used in government administration and is the medium of instruction in primary schools. Throughout India, Urd is typically spoken by Moslems, whereas Hindi is typically spoken by Hindus. India has several thousand daily Urd newspapers. There are Urd schools with their own curriculum.

Click on the MLA Interactive Language Map to find out where Hindi/Urd are spoken in the U.S.

English in Pakistan
Pakistan Woman Even though India and Pakistan achieved independence from British rule in 1947, the legacy of the English language continues to affect all aspects of society and of the educational system in the two countries, where education in English is a prerequisite for social status. English remains the sole language of higher education in almost every field of learning, and code-switching between Hindi/Urd and English is extremely common, especially among the educated elite. English continues to be a necessity for Pakistan, a country where the majority of the people speak Punjabi, where the national language is Urd, and where a large number of other languages are used on a daily basis.

Dialects

Urd is usually divided into four mutually intelligible dialects that, for the most part, are also intelligible to speakers of Hindi:

Dakhini is spoken in the Maharashtra state in India and around Hyderabad. It has fewer Persian and Arabic words than standard Urd
Pinjari
Rekhta is the language of Urd poetry.
Modern Vernacular Urd is spoken in the large cities, such as Delhi, Lucknow, Karachi and Lahore,

Structure

Sound System

Pakistan Woman

Pakistan Band

Pakistan Man

Pakistan Woman

Pakistan man

Pakistan Car

The sound system of Hindi/Urd is fairly typical of Indo-Aryan languages.

Vowels
Hindi has 10 oral vowel phonemes: Vowels can be oral or nasal. Nasalization makes a difference in word meaning, e.g., ak 'a plant,' ãk 'draw.'

Consonants
Hindi/Urd have a large consonant inventory. An exact number of consonants is difficult to determine due to regional differences in pronunciation. In addition, the extent to which consonant sounds that appear only in borrowed words should be considered part of Standard Hindi is also a matter of debate. In the table below, consonants that do not occur in all varieties of Hindi, and those that occur primarily in borrowings are given in parentheses. The following features are descriptive of the consonant system of Hindi/Urd.

Contrast between aspirated vs. unaspirated stops and affricates, including voiced ones, e.g., p—ph, t—th, k—kh, b—bh, d—dh, g—gh. Aspirated consonants are produced with a strong puff of air.
Contrast between and apical vs. retroflex stops and affricates, e.g., t—, d—. Apical consonants are produced with the tip of the tongue touching the roof of the mouth, whereas retroflex consonants are produced with the tongue curled, so that its underside comes in contact with the roof of the mouth.
The use of consonant clusters is extremely limited, even in borrowed words.

..	.	Labial	Apico-dental	Retroflex	Alveo-palatal	Velar	Uvular
Stops voiceless	unaspirated	p	t		....	k	(q)
Stops voiceless	aspirated	ph	th	h	....	kh	..
Stops voiced	unaspirated	b	d		...	g	.
Stops voiced	aspirated	bh	dh	h	...	gh	.
Fricatives	voiceless	.(f)	s	()		(x)	.
Fricatives	voiced	...	(z)	.	()	()	.
Affricates	unaspirated voiceless	........	c	...		.	..
	unaspirated voiced	......	j	...	j	..ŋ..	..
	aspirated voiceless	...	....	....	h	..	.
	aspirated voiced		.	.	jh
Nasals	...	m	n	()	()	.(
Laterals	...	......	l	..	.....	...	.
Flap	unaspirated	......	.		....	..	.
Flap	aspirated	.	.	h	.	.	.
Semi-vowels	.	w (v)	.	.	.	.	.

Stress
Stress in Hindi/Urd normally falls on the penultimate (i.e., next to the last) syllable of a word. The position of stress alone does not affect word meaning.

Click here to hear the pronunciation of Hindi/Urd sounds.

Grammar

Pakistan boy

Pakistan Woman

Pakistan man

Hindi/Urdū is a highly inflected language which utilizes prefixes and suffixes to form words and to express grammatical relations.

Noun phrase
Hindi/Urdū nouns are marked for the following categories:

number :singular and plural;
gender: masculine and feminine;
case: direct, oblique, and vocative;
the direct case is used to mark subjects of a sentence; the oblique case is used with postpositions;
there are four declensional paradigms for masculine and four declensional paradigms for feminine nouns;
adjectives agree with the nouns they modify in number, case, and case.
adjectives have fewer case forms than nouns;
pronouns have more case forms than nouns;
3rd-person pronouns are the same as proximate and remote demonstratives yh 'this and vh 'that.'
there is a 2nd-person honorific pronoun ap which is used with both singular/plural and male/female addressees.

Postpositions
Hindi/Urd uses postpositions, rather than prepositions to express various case relationships. Postpositions require that the nouns be used in the oblique case.

Verb phrase
Hindi/Urd verbs are marked for the following categories:

verbs occur in the following forms: root (kha 'eat'), imperfect stem (khatA), perfect stem (khayA), and infinitive (khanA). The stems agree with nouns in gender and number. ;
person: 1st, 2nd, 2nd honorific, 3rd;
number: singular and plural;
tense: present, past, future; tense distinction of present versus past is expressed by the auxiliary verb honA 'to be.'
aspect: imperfective and perfective;
mood: indicative, imperative, optative.

Politeness
Second-person personal pronouns are marked for three levels of politeness. Verbs in the 2nd person are also marked for politeness.

singular form tu (informal, extremely intimate, or disrespectful)
singular form tum (informal and showing intimacy)
plural form ap (formal and respectful).

Word order
Hindi/Urd word order is typically Subject-Object-Verb. Modifiers precede the nouns they modify.

Vocabulary

Pakistan Painting

Due to the influence of Islam, Urd has borrowed much of its formal and technical vocabulary from Persian and Arabic, In general, words of Persian origin, e.g., mard 'man' are considered more formal than words of Hindi origin, e.g., 'man.' Like Hindi, Urd has borrowed a large number of words from English and from other languages.

Here are a few common phrases in Urd:

UrduPhrases

Below are the Urd numbers 0-10 in in Perso-Arabic numerals and in transliteration:

Urdu Numerals

Writing

Urdu Script

Urd has been written since the 12th century in the Perso-Arabic script, an adaptation of the Persian alphabet, which, in turn, is derived from the Arabic alphabet. Urd is written in the Nasta’liq style which is difficult to typeset. As a result, Urd newspapers were printed from hand-written masters until the late 1980s. The daily Jang was the first Urd newspaper composed in Nasta’liq on the computer. Efforts are underway to develop more user-friendly Urd support for computers and the Internet.

The Arabic alphabet is written from right to left and is composed of 28 basic letters. Adaptations of the script for other languages such as Persian and Urdu have additional letters. There is no difference between upper and lower case, nor between written and printed letters. Most of the letters are attached to one another, even when printed, and their appearance changes as a function of whether they are connected to the preceding or following letters. Some combinations of letters form ligatures. Short vowels are not written, though long ones are—so the reader must know the language in order to restore the vowels. However, in editions of the Qur'an or in didactic works vowels are used – including a sign for vowel omission.

Urd is sometimes also written in the Roman script. Roman Urd has been used since the British Raj, due to the availability and low cost of Roman movable type. Roman Urd is regaining popularity among users of text-messaging and Internet services and is developing its own style and conventions. Bollywood and Lollywood use Roman Urd for their movie titles.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Urd in the Perso-Arabic script and in transliteration.

Translation
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

words in English
English has borrowed a few words from Urd. Here are two of them.

English word	from Urdū
khaki	khaki, literally 'dusty,' from khak 'dust'
*tandoori*	type of Indian cooking, from Urdu or Punjabi tandur 'cooking stove'

Resources

Click here to find out where is taught in the United States.
Click here to find learning materials for studying .

Online resources for the study of language and culture
Yamada Language Guide foe Hind/Urdu
The Urdu alphabet
UKindia: Learn to read Urdu
Urdu Dictionaries
Ethnologue Report for Hindi
Wikipedia article on Urdu
Omniglot guide to Urdu writing system
UCLA language profile for Urdu
BBC Urdu