Urdu

Urdu (اُرْدُو, urdū, [ˈʊɾduː] ) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken primarily in South Asia. It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also an official Eighth Schedule language in India, the status and cultural heritage of which are recognised by the Constitution of India — alongside having official status in several Indian states (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, West Bengal, and both Telugu states). Urdu and Hindi are closely related. They share a common, predominantly Sanskrit- and Prakrit-derived, vocabulary base, phonology, syntax, and grammar, making them mutually intelligible during colloquial communication. The common base of the two languages is sometimes referred to as the Hindi–Urdu or Hindustani language, and Urdu has been described as a Persianised standard register of the Hindustani language. While formal Urdu draws literary, political, and technical vocabulary from Persian and Arabic, formal Hindi draws these aspects from Sanskrit; consequently, the two languages' mutual intelligibility effectively decreases as the level of formality increases. Urdu originated geographically in the upper Ganga-Yamuna doab, in and around the Delhi region of India, where Khari Boli was spoken. Urdu shared a grammatical foundation with Khari Boli, but was written in a revised Perso-Arabic script and included vocabulary borrowed from Persian and Arabic, which retained its original grammatical structure in those languages. In 1837, Urdu became an official language of the British East India Company, replacing Persian across northern India during Company rule; Persian had until this point served as the court language of various Indo-Islamic empires. According to 2026 estimates by Ethnologue, Urdu is the 10th-most widely spoken language in the world, with 246 million total speakers, including those who speak it as a second language.