Urdu

Urdu is the official language of Pakistan and is also widely spoken in India. In Pakistan it is the mother tongue of about 10 million people and is spoken fluently as a second language by perhaps 80 million more. In India, where it is spoken by some 50 million Moslems, it is one of the official languages recognized by the constitution.

Urdu is very similar to Hindi, the most important difference between them being that the former is written in the Perso-Arabic script, while the latter is written in the Sanskrit characters. Urdu also contains many words from Arabic and Persian, while Hindi makes a conscious effort to preserve the older Indian words.

Urdu by origin is a dialect of Hindi spoken for centuries in the neighborhood of Delhi. In the 16th century, when India fell under Moslem domination, a large number of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish words entered the language via the military camps and the marketplaces of Delhi. Eventually a separate dialect evolved, written in Arabic characters with additional letters supplied for sounds peculiar to Indian and Persian words. In time it came to be called Urdu ('~camp language") and after further Moslem conquest became the lingua franca over much of the Indian subcontinent.

After the partition of India in 1947, Hindi became the principal language of India, and Urdu of West Pakistan. The older term Hindustani, embracing both languages, has fallen into general disuse since partition.