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Zaban Urdu Mualla
Zaban Urdu Mualla

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Urdu (اردو) is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan family which developed under Template:Ll, Turkish, and Arabic influence in the South Asia during the time of the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1200-1800).

Taken by itself, Urdu is approximately the twentieth most populous natively spoken language in the world, and is the national language of Pakistan as well as one of the 24 national languages of India. However, Urdu is often considered to be part of a wider Hindustani language, in which case it is the fourth most populous language in the world.

Speakers and geographic distribution

In Pakistan, Urdu is spoken as a mother tongue by a majority of urban dwellers in such cities as Karachi, Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar, Quetta, Hyderabad, Faisalabad, Multan and Sukkur. Urdu is used as official languages in all provinces of Pakistan. The Urdu medium school system has produced millions of Urdu speakers whose mother mother tongue is one of the regional languages of Pakistan such as Punjabi, Sindhi, Pakhtun, Kashmiri, Balochi, Seraiki, Brohi, etc. The Urdu is the lingua franca of Pakistan and is absorbing many words from regional languages of Pakistan. The regional languages are also being influenced by Urdu vocubulary. Urdu is flourishing in Pakistan and has millions of new speakers. Nearly four million Afghan refugees who stayed in Pakistan for over twenty years have also became fluent in Urdu. In Pakistan, Urdu is spoken as mother tongue by nearly 8% of the population.

In India, Urdu is spoken as a mother tongue in the northern and central states by three times the population it has in Pakistan. While Indian Muslims might ostensibly be seen as identifying more with Urdu, Hindus and Sikhs naturally speak Urdu regardless of religion, especially when they have also grown up in ancient Urdu speaking cities such as Lucknow and Hyderabad. Indeed, many contend that the language spoken in Bollywoods films is closer to Urdu than to Hindi, especially the songs.

Urdu is also spoken in urban Afghanistan. Outside the South Asia, it is spoken by large numbers of workers in the major urban centres of the Persian Gulf countries and Saudi Arabia. Urdu is also spoken by large numbers of immigrants and their children in the major urban centres of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Norway and Australia.

Countries with large numbers of first-language Urdu speakers:

Official Status

Urdu is the national language of Pakistan. It shares official language status with English. Although English is used in most elite circles, and Punjabi has a plurality of native speakers, Urdu is the lingua franca, and it is commonly expected to prevail. Urdu is also one of the official languages of India, and in the states of Jammu and Kashmir and Andhra Pradesh, Urdu has official language status. While the government school system in most other states emphasizes Standard Template:Ll, universities in cities such as Lucknow and Hyderabd, Urdu is spoken and learned and is regarded as a language of prestige.

Urdu is a member of the Indo Aryan family of languages, which is in turn a branch of the Indo European family. It is part of a dialect continuum which extends across northern South Asia from Template:Ll to Template:Ll. These idioms all have similar grammatical structures and a large portion of their vocabulary in common. Punjabi, for instance, is very similar to Urdu: Punjabi written in the Shahmukhi script can be understood by speakers of Urdu with a little difficulty, but spoken Punjabi has a very different phonology (pronunciation system) and cannot be easily understood by Urdu speakers. However, the language mostly closely linked to Urdu is Standard Hindi. (See below.)

Dialects

Urdu has four recognized dialects, Dakhini, Pinjari, Rekhta, and Modern Vernacular Urdu.

Modern Vernacular Urdu is the form of the language that is most widespread and is spoken around Delhi, Lucknow, Karachi and Lahore.

Dakhini (also known as Dakani, Deccani, Desia, Mirgan) is spoken in Maharashtra state in India and around Hyderabad. It has fewer Persian and Arabic words than standard Urdu.

In addition, Rekhta (or Rekhti), the language of Urdu poetry, is sometimes counted as a separate dialect.

Grammar

Urdu nouns fall into two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine. However, there is disagreement over the gender of some words, particularly words newly introduced from English which do not have genders.

In Urdu there is also a singular or a plural noun form.

Levels of formality in Urdu

Urdu in its less formalized register has been referred to as a raikhtha (ریختہ, "rough mixture"). This is essentially Hindustani. The more formal register of Urdu is sometimes referred to as Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Moalla (زبانﹺ اردوﹺ معلہ), the "Language of Camp and Court".

The etymology of the word used in the Urdu language for the most part decides how polite or refined your speech is. Urdu speakers would distinguish between paani and aab for example, or between kunwara and mard.

If a word is of Persian or Arabic origin, the level of speech is considered to be more formal and grand. Similarly, if Persian or Arabic grammar constructs, such as the Izafat are used in Urdu, the level of speech is also considered more formal and grand. An example of this would be the difference between Jinhe naaz hai Hind par, woh kahaan hai and sanaqaan-e-tasdeeq-e-mashriq kahaan hai.

Politeness

A host of words are used to show respect and politeness. These words are generally used with people who are older in age or with whom you are not acquainted. For example the English pronoun 'you' can be translated into three words in Urdu: the singular forms 'tu' (informal, extremely intimate, or derogatory) and 'tum' (informal) and the plural forms 'aap' (formal and respectful).

Vocabulary

Urdu has a vocabulary rich in words with Indian and Middle Eastern origins. The borrowings are dominated by words from Persian, and Arabic. There are also a number of borrowings from Sanskrit, Turkish, Portuguese and more recently English. Many of the words of Arabic origin have different nuances of meaning and usage than they do in Arabic.

Writing System

The Urdu Nasta’liq alphabet, with names in the Nagari and Latin alphabets
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

Urdu is written in a derivative of the Persian alphabet, which is itself derivative of the Arabic alphabet. Like Semitic Languages, Urdu script is written from right to left. Urdu is similar in appearance and letters to Arabic, Persian, and Pashto. In their modern incarnation, Urdu differs in appearance from Arabic in that it typically uses the more complex and sinuous Nasta’liq style of script, whereas Arabic is more commonly written in the modernized Naskh style. Nasta’liq is notoriously difficult to typeset, so Urdu newspapers were made from hand-written masters (a.k.a katib or khush-navees) till late 1980s. The daily Jang was the first urdu newspaper composed in Nasta’liq on computer. There are efforts underway to develop more sophisticated and user-friendly Urdu support on computers and internet. Now-a-days, nearly all urdu newspapers, magazines, journals, and periodicals composed on computers via various urdu software.

Usually, bare transliterations of Urdu into Roman letters omit many phonemic elements which have no equivalent in English or other languages commonly written in the Latin alphabet. It should be noted that a reasonably comprehensive system has emerged with specific notations to signify non-English sounds, but it can only be properly read by someone already familiar with Urdu, Persian, or Arabic for letters such as:ژ خ غ ط ص or ق and Hindi for letters such as ڑ . This script may be found on the internet, and it allows people understanding the language without knowledge of their written forms to communicate with each other.

A list of the Urdu alphabet and pronunciation is given below . Urdu contains many historical spellings from Arabic and Persian, and therefore has many irregularities. The Arabic letters yaa and haa are split in two in Urdu; one of the yaa variants is used at the ends of words for a long ē sound, and one of the haa variants is used to indicate the aspirated consonants. The retroflex consonants needed to be added as well; this was accomplished by placing a superscript ط (toay) above the corresponding dental consonants. Several letters which represent distinct consonants in Arabic are conflated in Persian, and this has carried over to Urdu.

Letter Name of letter Pronunciation in the IPA
ا alif [ə, ɑ] after a consonant; silent when initial.
ب bay [b]
پ pay [p]
ت tay dental [t̪]
ٹ ttay retroflex [ʈ]
ث say [s]
ج jeem [dʒ]
چ chay [tʃ]
ح badee hay [h]
خ khay [x]
د daal dental [d̪]
ڈ ddaal retroflex [ɖ]
ذ zaal [z]
ر ray dental [r]
ڑ arr retroflex [ɽ]
ز zay [z]
ژ zhay [ʒ]
س seen [s]
ش sheen [ʃ]
ص suaad [s]
ض zuaad [z]
ط toay [t]
ظ zoay [z]
ع aein [ɑ] after a consonant; otherwise [ʔ], [ə], or silent.
غ ghain [ɣ]
ف fay [f]
ق qaaf [q]
ک kaaf [k]
گ gaaf [g]
ل laam [l]
م meem [m]
ن noon [n] or a nasal vowel
و vaao [v, u, ʊ, o, ow]
ہ, ﮩ, ﮨ chottee hay [ɑ] at the end of a word, otherwise [h] or silent
ھ do chasmee hay indicates that the preceding consonant is aspirated (p, t, ch, k) or murmured (b, d, j, g).
ی chottee yay [j, i, e, ɛ]
ے badee yay [eː]
ء hamzah [ʔ] or silent

Urdu is occasionally also written in the Roman script. Roman Urdu has been used since the days of the British Raj, partly as a result of the availability and low cost of Roman movable type for printing presses. The use of Roman Urdu was common in contexts such as product labels. Today it is regaining popularity among users of text-messaging and Internet services and is developing its own style and conventions. Habib R. Sulemani says, "the younger generation of Urdu speaking people around the world are using [Romanized Urdu] on the Internet and it has become essential for them, because they use the Internet and English is its language. A person from Islamabad chats with another in Delhi on the Internet only in Roman Urdu. They both speak (almost) the same language but with different scripts […]. Moreover, the younger generation of those who are from the English medium schools or settled in the west, can speak Urdu but can’t write it in the traditional Arabic script and thus Roman Urdu is a blessing for such a population."

Examples

English Urdu IPA Notes
Hello السلام علیکم ˈaʔsaɭam ˈaɭikum اداب [aˈdaːb] would generally
be used to give respect.
و علیکم السلام [ˈwaɭikum ˈaʔsaɭam]
is the correct response.
Hello اداب عرض ہے aˈdaːb aɽˈzai "Regards to you"
(lit Regards are expressed),
a very formal secular greeting.
Good Bye خدا حافظ kudaː hafəz Xuda is Persian for God,
and Hafiz is from Arabic hifz "protection".
So lit. "May God be your Guardian."
Standard and commonly used
by Muslims and non-Muslims
yes ہاں haː̃ casual
yes جی ʤi formal
no نا nã casual
no نہیں ˈna̤i formal
please مہربانی mɛhɛrˈbani
thank you شکریہ ʃʊˈkrija
Please come in تشریف لائیے aːpʰ ʈaˈʃrif ɭaˈiː lit. Bring your honor
Please have a seat تشریف رکھیئے aːpʰ ʈaˈʃrif ɽaˈxi lit. Place your honor
I am happy to meet you اپ سے مل کر خوشی ہوی aːpʰ sɛ miɭ kar kʊˈʃi hwi
Do you speak English? کیا اپ انگریزی بولتے ہیں؟ kja aːpʰ ˈaŋgrɛzi boɭʈɛ hæ̃
I do not speak Urdu. میں اردو نہیں بولتا mæ̃ urdʰu nahĩ boɭʈa
My name is ... میرا نام ۔۔۔ ہے mɛɾa naːm ... hai
Which way to Lahore لاھور کس طرف ہے؟
Where is Bombay? ممبئی کہاں ہے؟
Urdu is a good language. اردو ایک اچھی زبان ہے

Literature

Urdu has only become a literary language in recent centuries, as Persian and Arabic were formerly the idioms of choice for "elevated" subjects. However, despite its late development, Urdu literature boasts some world-recognized artists and a considerable corpus.

Prose

Religious

After Arabic and Persian, Urdu holds the largest collection of work on Islamic literature and sharia. These include translations and interpretation of Quran, commentary on Hadith, Fiqh, history, spirituality, Sufism and metaphysics. A great number of classical texts from Arabic and Persian, have also been translated into Urdu. Relatively inexpensive publishing, combined with the use of Urdu as a lingua franca among Muslims of South Asia, has meant that Islam-related works in Urdu far outnumber such works in any other South Asian language. One of the most popular Islamic books was originally written in Urdu, the Faizal-e-Amal.

Literary

Secular prose includes all categories of widely known fiction and non-fiction work, separable into genres.

The daastaan, or tale, a traditional story which may have many characters and complex plotting. This has now fallen into disuse.

The afsaana, or short story, probably the best-known genre of Urdu fiction. The best-known afsaana writers, or afsaana nigaar, in Urdu are Saadat Hasan Manto, Qurat-ul-Ain Haider, Munshi Premchand, Krishan Chander, Ghulam Abbas, Banu Qudsia and Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi. Premchand, a Hindi writer, became known as a pioneer in the afsaana, though some contend that his were not technically the first as Sir Ross Masood had already written many short stories in Urdu.

Novels form a genre of their own, in the tradition of the English novel.

Other genres include saférnama, sarguzisht, inshaeya, murasela, and khud navvisht.

Poetry

File:Ghalib.gif
Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869), a great Urdu poet

Urdu has been the premiere language of poetry in South Asia for two centuries, and has developed a rich tradition in a variety of poetic genres.

Foreign forms such as the sonnet, azad nazm and haiku have also been used by some modern Urdu poets.

Probably the most widely recited, and memorized genre of contemporary Urdu poetry is naat—panegyric poetry written in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. Naat can be of any formal category, but is most commonly in the ghazal form. The language used in Urdu naat ranges from the intensely colloquial to a highly Persianized formal language. The great early twentieth century scholar Imam Ahmad Raza Khan, who wrote many of the most well known naats in Urdu, epitomized this range in a ghazal of nine stanzas (bayt) in which every stanza contains half a line each of Arabic, Persian, formal Urdu, and colloquial Hindi. The same poet composed a salaam—a poem of greeting to the Prophet Muhammad, derived from the unorthodox practice of qiyam, or standing, during the mawlid, or celebration of the birth of the Prophet—Mustafa Jan-e Rahmat, which, due to being recited on Fridays in some Urdu speaking mosques throughout the world, is probably the more frequently recited Urdu poems of the modern era.

Another important genre of urdu prose are the poems commemorating the martyrdom of imam Hussain and Battle of Karbala, called noha (نوحہ) and marsia. Anees and Dabeer are famous in this regard.

History

Main article: History of Urdu

Urdu developed as local Indo-Aryan dialects came under the influence of the Muslim courts that ruled the South Asia from the early thirteenth century on. The official language of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and their successor states, as well as the cultured language of poetry and literature, was Template:Ll, while the language of religion was Template:Ll. The mingling of these languages led to a vernacular that is the ancestor of today's Template:Ll. Dialects of this vernacular are spoken today in cities and villages throughout Pakistan and northern India. Cities with a particularly strong tradition of Urdu include Hyderabad, Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, and Lucknow.

The birthplace of the Urdu language is not known with certainty. Urdu literature has been found from the Delhi Sultanate. One hypothesis proposes that Urdu originated in or around Delhi over a period of several centuries, and that initially it was used and adopted by Muslims. The word urdu itself comes from the Template:Ll word ordu, "tent" or "army", from which we get the word "horde". Hence Urdu is sometimes called "Lashkari zaban" or the language of the Army.

Wherever Muslim soldiers and officials settled, they carried Urdu with them. Urdu (along with Persian) enjoyed commanding status in the literary courts of Muslim rulers and nawabs, and flourished under their patronage, partially displacing Sanskrit as the language of religious intellectuals in Indian society. The prestige bestowed upon Urdu at the expense of Sanskrit was a source of irritation for many religious Hindus, and to this day there remains religiously motivated conflict between the languages that sometimes makes dialogue difficult.

Urdu and Hindi

Standard Urdu and Standard Hindi are sometimes considered to be distinct languages, and sometimes dialects of a Hindustani language. There are two fundamental distinctions between them: the source of learned vocabulary (Persian or Sanskrit), and the script used to write them (an adaptation of the Persian script written in Nasta'liq style, or the devanagari alphabet). In colloquial situations in Delhi, where neither learned vocabulary nor writing is used, the distinction between the Urdu and Hindi is nearly meaningless. Outside of the Delhi dialect area, the distinction may be more pronounced even in colloquial speech, for "Hindi" in such cases will often refer to the local dialect.

The word 'Hindi' has two uses; confusion of these is one of the primary causes of debate about the identity of Urdu.

  • One use of 'Hindi' is to indicate those idioms in the North Indian dialect continuum that are not recognized as separate languages from the language of Delhi. Template:Ll and Template:Ll are not considered Hindi because of their long history as literary languages and because of official recognition. Template:Ll, Template:Ll, and Template:Ll are also often recognized to be distinct languages, though sometimes considered Hindi dialects. However, many other local idioms, such as the Template:Ll languages, which do not have such a distinct identity, are almost always considered to be dialects of Hindi. In other words, the boundaries of "Hindi" have little to do with mutual intelligibility, and instead depend on social perceptions of what constitutes a language.
  • The other use of the word is Standard Hindi, the specific form of the Delhi dialect of Hindi (called Hindustani) that is India's foremost national language.

Standard Urdu is also a standardized form of Hindustani. Such a state of affairs, with two standardized forms of what is essentially one language, is known as a diasystem.

Colloquial Urdu, on the other hand, basically is Hindustani; it can be argued that Standard Hindi is a form of colloquial Urdu, intentionally de-Persianized and de-Arabicized, with its formal vocabulary borrowed instead from Sanskrit. The colloquial language spoken by villagers and the lower classes of Delhi is indistinguishable by ear, whether it is called Hindi or Urdu by its speakers. The only important distinction at this level is in the script: if written in the Arab-Persian script, the language is generally considered to be Urdu, and if written in devanagari it is generally considered to be Hindi. However, since independence the formal registers used in education and the media have become increasingly divergent in their vocabulary. Where there is no colloquial word for a concept, Standard Urdu uses Perso-Arabic vocabulary, while Standard Hindi uses Sanskrit vocabulary. This results in the official languages being heavily Sanskritized or Persianized, and nearly unintelligible to speakers educated in the other standard.

These two standardized registers of Hindustani have become so entrenched as separate languages that often nationalists, both Hindu and Muslim, claim that Hindi and Urdu have always been separate languages. However, there are unifying forces as well. For example, it is said that Indian Bollywood films are made in "Hindi", but the language used in most of them is the same as that of Urdu speakers in Pakistan. The dialogue is frequently developed in English and later translated to an intentionally neutral Hindustani which can be easily understood by speakers of most North Indian languages, both in India itself and in Pakistan. The songs, however, are typically pure Urdu, and many of the top Urdu poets make their livings writing for "Hindi" films. That is why Indian films are extremely popular in Pakistan.

Footnote

Template:FnAs in Ghalib's famous couplet where he compares himself to his great predecessor, the master poet Mir :

Urdu Script

ریختــہ کے تــم ہـی استــاد نہیں ہـو غــالب
کہتے ہیں اگلے زمانے میں کوئی میر بھی تھا

Romanized

Raikhtha kai tum hee ustadh nahee ho Ghalib
Kehthay hain aglay zamaanay main ko'ee Mir bhee thhaa

Translation

You, alone, are not the only expert of 'Raikhta', Ghalib
It is said that even once there existed someone named, Mir

Bibliography

  • Asher, R. E. (Ed.). (1994). The Encyclopedia of language and linguistics. Oxford: Pergamon Press. ISBN 0-0803-5943-4.
  • Azim, Anwar. (1975). Urdu a victim of cultural genocide. In Z. Imam (Ed.), Muslims in India (p. 259).
  • Chatterji, Suniti K. (1960). Indo-Aryan and Hindi (rev. 2nd ed.). Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay.
  • Dua, Hans R. (1992). Hindi-Urdu as a pluricentric language. In M. G. Clyne (Ed.), Pluricentric languages: Differing norms in different nations. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN 3-1101-2855-1.
  • Dua, Hans R. (1994b). Urdu. In Asher (Ed.) (pp. 4863-4864).
  • Dua, Hans R. (1994a). Hindustani. In Asher (Ed.) (pp. 1554).
  • Kelkar, A. R. (1968). Studies in Hindi-Urdu: Introduction and word phonology. Poona: Deccan College.
  • Khan, M. H. (1969). Urdu. In T. A. Sebeok (Ed.), Current trends in linguistics (Vol. 5). The Hague: Mouton.
  • Narang, G. C.; & Becker, D. A. (1971). Aspiration and nasalization in the generative phonology of Hindi-Urdu. Language, 47, 646-767.
  • Ohala, M. (1972). Topics in Hindi-Urdu phonology. (PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles).
  • Rai, Amrit. (1984). A house divided: The origin and development of Hindi-Hindustani. Delhi: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-1956-1643-X.

See also

alphabetically arranged

Urdu edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sites About Urdu

Online Use of Urdu
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