Spread of the Urdu language
Urdu is one of two official national languages in Pakistan and is spoken as a mother tongue by a minority in other South Asian countries. Urdu is also the official language in several Indian states and enjoys constitutional protection in India as a "classical language" alongside 21 other languages.Urdu (native name: اردو) has its roots in the Indo-Iranian language family.
With around 70 million native speakers, Urdu is the most widely spoken language in India. In total, over 90 million people worldwide speak Urdu as their mother tongue. The number of second language speakers is estimated at an additional 80 million.
Origins and development of the language
Its origins can be traced back to medieval North India, and Urdu developed from the linguistic blending of Sanskrit, local Prakrits and Persian-Arabic during the Delhi Sultanates and the Mughal Empire. This linguistic synthesis began around the 12th century and intensified in the 16th and 17th centuries when the Mughal rulers made Persian the language of administration and culture.Urdu and Hindi have a common linguistic root in the Khari Boli dialect, which was spoken in and around Delhi in the 13th century. The two languages began to differentiate in the 19th century, mainly through the different adoption of loan words from Persian and Arabic into Urdu and from Sanskrit into Hindi.
The present form of Urdu is heavily influenced by Persian and Arabic, both in vocabulary and script, which is a form of the Persian Nastaliq script. These influences point to the historical Muslim presence in South Asia. In contrast, Hindi has stronger ties to Sanskrit and uses the Devanagari script.
During the British colonial period in the 19th century, Urdu was promoted as a literary language in Muslim circles. It became a symbol of Muslim identity and culture, leading to the creation of Pakistan as a nation in 1947, in which Urdu was declared the national language, although it was not the most widely spoken language there.
| Country | Region | Official language | Distribution | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| India | South Asia | no | 5.0 % | 72,547,000 |
| Pakistan | South Asia | yes | 7.6 % | 19,096,000 |
| Afghanistan | South Asia | no | 2.0 % | 853,000 |
| Nepal | South Asia | no | 2.6 % | 771,000 |
| Saudi Arabia | Western Asia | no | 2.0 % | 706,000 |
| United Arab Emirates | Western Asia | no | 1.2 % | 132,000 |
Unless otherwise described in the text, this page is about native speakers — not the total number of speakers. How many people understand or speak Urdu as a subsequently learned language is not the subject of this page. Countries where native speakers make up only a few thousand, or even a few hundred people, or countries with a percentage well below 1% are unlikely to be listed here.
Official language, national language or lingua franca: explanation of frequently used terms
