Urdu language

Urdu (اردو ) is a Central Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family of languages, spoken in India, Pakistan, and by South Asian emigrant communities all over the world. It is a derivative of Hindustani, and is an official language and one of the 22 scheduled languages specified in the Constitution of India. It has official language status in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, and New Delhi. It is also one of the two official languages of Pakistan (the other being English). There are between 60 and 80 million native speakers of standard Urdu.

Under the influence of the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal Empire, and their successors, Urdu borrowed many words from Persian, Arabic, and Turkish. It also borrowed from Indian languages and English. Because of Urdu's similarity to Hindi and since both languages have the same roots, speakers of the two languages can usually understand one another. Urdu in Pakistan has recently borrowed many words from Pakistani languages like Punjabi, Sindhi and Pashto.

In India, Urdu is spoken in places where there are large Muslim populations. Outside South Asia, it is spoken by large numbers of migrant South Asians in the major urban centres of 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, Germany, Norway and Australia.

Urdu has four recognised dialects: Dakhni, Pinjari, Rekhta, and Modern Vernacular Urdu. Dakhni is spoken in Deccan region of southern India. It uses a mixture of words from Marathi and Telugu, as well as some words from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish that are not found in the standard dialect of Urdu. Dakhni is widely spoken in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu.

Modern Vernacular Urdu is the form of the language that is least widespread and is spoken around Delhi and Lucknow. The Pakistani variant is spoken in Karachi and Lahore. Rekhta (or Rekhti), the language of Urdu poetry, is sometimes counted as a separate dialect.
If a word is of Persian or Arabic origin, the level of speech is considered to be more formal and grand. If a word is inherited from Sanskrit, the level of speech is considered more colloquial and personal.

Urdu is written right-to-left in an extension of the Persian alphabet, which is itself an extension of the Arabic alphabet. Urdu is associated with the Nasta’liq script style of Arabic calligraphy. Urdu speakers in India have recently adopted Devanagari for publishing Urdu periodicals and have innovated new strategies to mark Urdū in Devanagari as distinct from Hindi in Devanagari.

Urdu is occasionally also written in the Roman script. Roman Urdu has been used since the days of British rule. Today it is regaining popularity among users of text-messaging and Internet services and is developing its own style and conventions. Roman Urdu also holds significance among the Christians of Pakistan and North India.

The normal Urdu word order is subject-object-verb. Urdu has no definite article.

The Urdu noun has two genders: masculine and feminine, identified by their suffixes. Plural nouns have suffixes to indicate their number when the nouns have gender marks.

There is no distinction between masculine and feminine pronouns in Urdu. But it has third person pronouns to refer to people who are near and people who are distant. Like Hindi, it has honorific levels in second person pronouns. There are three second person pronouns: tu, the extremely informal form, tum, the non-honorific form, and aap, the honorific form.

Adjectives are classified into two types: those with suffixes that indicate gender and number, and those that have no suffixes. They precede the nouns they qualify.

Urdu has postpositions instead of prepositions. Borrowed from Arabic or Persian, they are only a few. Their spelling changes acording to the gender of the noun they follow.

Urdu verbs are conjugated as per their tense, number, gender, and mood. Verbs in the infinitive form are indicated by the addition of the suffix 'na' (e.g., jana - to go, kehna - to say). Urdu verbs have six tenses: present imperfect, past imperfect, simple past, present perfect, past perfect, and future.

Information: Wikipedia