Urdu is a register of the Hindustani language identified with Muslims. It is the national language and one of the two official languages of Pakistan (the other being English), and one of 22 scheduled languages of India, as an official language of five Indian states. Based on the dialect of Delhi, Hindustani aka Urdu developed under Persian, Arabic and Turkic influence over the course of almost 900 years. It began to take shape in what is now Uttar Pradesh during the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1527), and continued to develop under the Mughal Emipire (1526–1858). Modern Urdu is mutually intelligible with the younger register of Hindustani, which is often simply called "Hindi".
Urdu is often contrasted with Hindi. The main differences
between the two are that Standard Urdu is conventionally written in Nastaliq calligraphy style of the Perso-Arabic script and relies heavily on Persian and
Arabic as a source for technical and literary language, whereas Standard Hindi is
conventionally written in Devanagari and draws on Sanskrit. However, both have large
numbers of Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit words, and most linguists consider
them to be two standardized forms of the same language. Because of religious
nationalism since the partition of British India and continued communal tensions,
native speakers of both Hindi and Urdu frequently assert them to be completely
distinct languages, despite the fact that they generally cannot tell the
colloquial languages apart.
There are between 60 and 70 million speakers of Urdu: There were 52 million in India per the 2001 census, some 6% of the population; 12 million in Pakistan in 2008, or 14%; and several hundred thousand apiece in the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, United Stated ad Bangladesh, where it is called "Bihari".However, a knowledge of Urdu allows one to speak with far more people than that, as Hindi-Urdu is the fourth most commonly spoken language in the world, after Mandarin, English and Spanish.
Urdu is also one of the
officially recognised languages in India and has official language status
in the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Jammu and Kashmir and the national captal New Delhi.
In Jammu and Kashmir, section 145 of the Kashmir Constitution provides: "The official language of the State shall be Urdu but the English language shall unless the Legislature by law otherwise provides, continue to be used for all the official purposes of the State for which it was being used immediately before the commencement of the Constitution." As of 2010, the English language continues to be used as an official language for more than 90% of official work in Kashmir. There are ongoing efforts to make Kashmiri and Dogri, spoken as mother tongues by nearly 80% of the population of Indian-administered Kashmir, as official languages alongside English.
The importance of Urdu in the Muslim world is visible in the Holy cities of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia where most informational signage is written in Arabic, English and Urdu, and sometimes in other languages.
