Urdu (/ˈʊərduː/;[12] Urdu: اُردُو, ALA-LC: Urdū) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia.[13][14] It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan.[15] In India, Urdu is an Eighth Schedule language whose status, function, and cultural heritage is recognized by the Constitution of India;[16][17] it also has an official status in several Indian states.[note 1][15] In Nepal, Urdu is a registered regional dialect.[18]
Urdu has been described as a Persianised register of the Hindustani language.[19][20] Urdu and Hindi share a common Sanskrit- and Prakrit-derived vocabulary base, phonology, syntax, and grammar, making them mutually intelligible during colloquial communication.[21][22] While formal Urdu draws literary, political, and technical vocabulary from Persian,[23]formal Hindi draws these aspects from Sanskrit; consequently, the two languages' mutual intelligibility effectively decreases as the factor of formality increases.
In 1837, Urdu was chosen by the British East India Company as the language to replace Persian across northern India during Company rule; Persian had until this point served as the court language of the Indo-Islamic empires.[24] Religious, social, and political factors arose during the European colonial period that advocated for a distinction between Urdu and Hindi, leading to the Hindi–Urdu controversy.[25]
Urdu became a literary language in the 18th century and two similar standard forms came into existence in Delhi and Lucknow; since the partition of India in 1947, a third standard has arisen in the Pakistani city of Karachi.[26][27] Deccani, an older form used in southern India, became a court language of the Deccan sultanates in the 16th century.[28][27]
As of 2021[update], Urdu is the 21st-largest first language spoken in the world, with approximately 61.9 million native speakers.[29] According to 2018 estimates by Ethnologue, Urdu is the 10th-most widely spoken language in the world,[30] with 230 million total speakers, including those who speak it as a second language.[31] If spoken colloquial contexts are broadly taken into account, the Hindustani language (Hindi–Urdu) is the 3rd-most spoken language in the world.[31]
Urdu, like Hindi, is a form of Hindustani.[32][33][34] Some linguists have suggested that the earliest forms of Urdu evolved from the medieval (6th to 13th century) Apabhraṃśa register of the preceding Shauraseni language, a Middle Indo-Aryan language that is also the ancestor of other modern Indo-Aryan languages.[35][36]