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Urdū (اردو), historically spelled Ordu, is an Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-Iranian branch, belonging to Indo-European family of languages. It developed under Persian and Arabic, to some lesser degree also under Turkic influence in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1526–1858 AD). Urdū refers to a standardised register of Hindustani[1] termed khaṛībolī, that emerged as a standard dialect.[2] The grammatical description in this article concerns this standard Urdū. In general, the term "Urdū" can encompass dialects of Hindustani other than the standardised versions.
Urdū is often contrasted with Hindi, another standardised form of Hindustani. The main difference between the two is that Standard Urdū is written in Nastaliq calligraphy style of the Perso-Arabic script and draws heavily on Persian and Arabic loanwords, while Standard Hindi is written in Devanāgarī and has inherited significant vocabulary from Sanskrit. Linguists therefore consider Urdū and Hindi to be two standardized forms of the same language.[3]
Speakers and geographic distributionImage:Zaban urdu mualla.png The phrase Zaban-e Urdu-e Mualla written in Nasta'liq. There are between 60 and 80 million native speakers of standard Urdū (Khari Boli). Overall, besides the more than 160 million who speak Urdū in Pakistan, there is a considerable Indian population who communicate in Urdū every day. According to the SIL ethnologue (1999 data), Hindi/Urdu is the fifth most spoken language in the world. According to Comerie (1998 data), Hindi-Urdu is the second most spoken language in the world, with 330 million native speakers, after Mandarin and possibly English. Because of Urdū's similarity to Hindi, speakers of the two languages can usually understand one another, if both sides refrain from using specialized vocabulary. Indeed, linguists sometimes count them as being part of the same language diasystem. However, Urdū and Hindi are socio-politically different, and people who self-describe as being speakers of Hindi would question their being counted as native speakers of Urdū, and vice-versa.
In India, Urdū is spoken in places where there are large Muslim majorities or cities which were bases for Muslim Empires in the past. These include parts of Uttar Pradesh (namely Lucknow), Delhi, Bhopal, Hyderabad, Bangalore, and Mysore. Some Indian schools teach Urdū as a first language and have their own syllabus and exams. Indian madrasahs also teach Arabic as well as Urdū. India has more than 2,900 daily Urdū newspapers. Newspapers such as Daily Salar, Daily Pasban, Siasat Daily, Munsif Daily and Inqilab are published and distributed in Bangalore, Mysore, Hyderabad, and Mumbai. Outside South Asia, it is spoken by large numbers of migrant South Asian workers in the major urban centers of the Persian Gulf countries and Saudi Arabia. Urdū is also spoken by large numbers of immigrants and their children in the major urban centers of the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Norway and Australia. Countries with large numbers of native Urdū speakers:
Official statusUrdū is the national language of Pakistan and is spoken and understood throughout the country. It shares official language status with English. It is used in education, literature, office and court business, media, and in religious institutions. It holds in itself a repository of the cultural, religious and social heritage of the country.[14] Although English is used in most elite circles, and Punjabi has a plurality of native speakers, Urdū is the lingua franca and is expected to prevail. Urdū is also one of the officially recognized state languages in India[15] and has official language status in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jammu and Kashmir, and Uttar Pradesh, and the national capital, Delhi. While the government school system in most other states emphasizes Standard Hindi, at universities in cities such as Lucknow, Aligarh and Hyderabad, Urdū is spoken, learned, and regarded as a language of prestige. Classification and related languagesUrdū is a member of the Indo-Aryan family of languages (i.e., those languages descending from Sanskrit), which is in turn a branch of the Indo-Iranian group (which comprises the Indo-Aryan and the Iranian branches), which itself is a member of the Indo-European linguistic family. If Hindi and Urdū are considered to be the same language (Hindustani (or Hindi-Urdū), then Urdū can be considered to be a part of a dialect continuum which extends across eastern Iran, Afghanistan and modern Pakistan[16]—right into north India. These idioms all have similar grammatical structures and share a large portion of their vocabulary. Punjabi, for instance, is very similar to Urdū; Punjabi written in the Shahmukhi script can be understood by speakers of Urdū with little difficulty, but spoken Punjabi has a very different phonology (pronunciation system) and can be harder to understand for Urdū speakers. DialectsUrdū has four recognised dialects: Dakhini, Pinjari, Rekhta, and Modern Vernacular Urdū (based on the Khariboli dialect of the Delhi region). Sociolinguists also consider Urdū iself one of the four major variants of the Hindi-Urdū dialect continuum.[17] Modern Vernacular Urdū is the form of the language that is least widespread and is spoken around Delhi, Lucknow, Karachi and Lahore, it becomes increasingly divergent from the original form of Urdū as it loses some of the complicated Persian and Arabic vocabulary used in everyday terms. 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 Urdū. In addition, Rekhta (or Rekhti), the language of Urdū poetry, is sometimes counted as a separate dialect. GrammarDespite Urdū and English both being Indo-European languages, Urdū grammar can be very complex and is different in many ways from what English-speakers are used to. Most notably, Urdū is a subject-object-verb language, meaning that verbs usually fall at the end of the sentence rather than before the object (as in English). Urdū also shows mixed ergativity so that, in some cases, verbs agree with the object of a sentence rather than the subject. Unlike English, Urdū has no definite article (the). The numeral ek might be used as the indefinite singular article (a/an) if this needs to be stressed. Urdū uses postpositions (so called because they are placed after nouns) where English uses prepositions. Other differences include gender, honorifics, interrogatives, use of cases, and different tenses. While being complicated, Urdū grammar is fairly regular, with irregularities being relatively limited. Despite differences in vocabulary and writing, Urdū grammar is nearly identical with that of Hindi. Urdū also has a unique punctuation system. Periods are sometimes used to end a sentence, though the traditional "full stop" (a horizontal line "-") is more generally used. After a heading, a colon followed by a dash (-:) is used. Colons are used in almost the same way as in English. Semi-colons and ellipsis (...) are not generally used in Urdū. However, we can see their use sometimes because Urdū is still evolving and is influenced by English. Urdū punctuation sometimes uses western conventions for commas, exclamation points, and question marks. GendersIn Urdū, as well as in Hindi, there are only two genders for nouns. All male human beings and male animals (as well as those animals and plants which are perceived as being "male") are masculine. All female human beings and female animals (as well as those animals and plants which are perceived as being "female") are feminine. Things, inanimate articles and abstract nouns are also either masculine or feminine according to convention, which must be memorised by non-Urdū speakers if they wish to learn correct Urdū. While this is similar to Hindi and most other Indo-European languages such as French, it is a very challenging learning requirement for speakers of languages which do not have such gender inflection. It is also a challenge for those who are used to only the English language, which although an Indo-European language, has eliminated almost all of its gender inflection. The ending of a word, if a vowel, usually helps in this gender classification. If a word of Hindi origin ends in long ā, it is normally masculine. If a word ends in ī, i, or iyā, it is normally feminine. Similarly, Urdu tries to match the gender of words borrowed from Arabic, Persian, and other languages that have grammatical gender. The categorisation of Urdū words directly borrowed from English is arbitrary, but may be influenced by how the words end phonologically in English. Adjectives ending in a long [ɑ:] must be inflected to agree with the gender of the noun. Interrogative pronounsBesides the standard interrogative pronouns "who" (کون kaun), "what" (کیا kyā), "why" (کیوں kyon), "when" (کب kab), "where" (کہاں kahān), "how" / "what kind of" (کیسا kaisā), "how many" (کِتنا kitnā), etc, the Urdū word (کیا kyā) can be used as a generic interrogative often placed at the beginning of a sentence to turn a statement into a Yes/No question (compare French Est-ce que). This makes it clear that a question is being asked. Questions can also be formed simply by modifying intonation, exactly as some questions are in English. Personal pronounsUrdū has pronouns in the first, second and third persons, all of which are undifferentiated for gender. Thus, unlike English, there is no difference between he and she. More strictly speaking, the third person of the pronoun is identical with the demonstrative pronoun ("this" / "that"). Gender distinction is, however, normally indicated in the conjugation of the verb. The pronouns have additional cases of accusative and genitive. There may also be multiple ways of inflecting the pronouns. Note that for the second person of the pronoun you, Urdū has three levels of honorifics:
Imperatives (requests and commands) correspond in form to the level of honorific being used, and the verb inflects to show the level of respect and politeness desired. Because imperatives can already include politeness, the word مہربانی "meharbānī", which can be translated as "please", is much less common than in spoken English; it is generally only used in writing or announcements. Word orderThe standard word order in Urdū is, in general, Subject Object Verb, but where different emphasis or more complex structure is needed, this rule is very easily set aside (provided that the nouns/pronouns are always followed by their postpositions or case markers). More specifically, the standard order is 1. Subject 2. Adverbs (in their standard order) 3. Indirect object and any of its adjectives 4. Direct object and any of its adjectives 5. Negation term or interrogative, if any, and finally the 6. Verb and any auxiliary verbs. (Snell, p93) The standard order can be modified in various ways to impart emphasis on particular parts of the sentence. Negation is formed by adding the word نہیں nahīn, meaning "no", in the appropriate place in the sentence, or by utilizing نہ na or مت mut in some cases. Note that in Urdū, the adjectives precede the nouns they qualify. The auxiliaries always follow the main verb. Also, Urdū speakers or writers enjoy considerable freedom in placing words to achieve stylistic and other socio-psychological effects, though not as much freedom as in heavily inflected languages. Tense and aspect of Urdū verbsUrdū verbal structure is focused on aspect with distinctions based on tense usually shown through use of the verb to be (ہونا honā) as an auxiliary. There are three aspects: habitual (imperfect), progressive (also known as continuous) and perfective. Verbs in each aspect are marked for tense in almost all cases with the proper inflected form of honā. Urdū has four simple tenses, present, past, future (presumptive), and subjunctive (referred to as a mood by many linguists). Verbs are conjugated not only to show the number and person (1st, 2nd, 3rd) of their subject, but also its gender. Additionally, Urdū has imperative and conditional moods. CaseUrdū is a weakly inflected language for case; the relationship of a noun in a sentence is usually shown by postpositions (i.e., prepositions that follow the noun). Urdū has three cases for nouns. The Direct case is used for nouns not followed by any postpositions, typically for the subject case. The Oblique case is used for any nouns that is followed by a postposition. Adjectives modifying nouns in the oblique case will inflect that same way. Some nouns have a separate Vocative case. Urdū has two numbers: singular and plural—but they may not be shown distinctly in all declinations. Levels of formality in UrdūThe order of words in Urdū is not as rigidly fixed as it is thought to be by traditional grammarians. Although usually (but not invariably) an Urdū sentence begins with a subject and the ends with a verb. That is why Urdū is often called as SOV language (e.g. Subject-Object-Verb language). However, Urdū speakers or writers enjoy considerable freedom in placing words in an utterance to achieve stylistic effects, see Bhatia and Koul (2000, pp. 34-35). Urdū in its less formalised register has been referred to as a rekhta (ریختہ, [reːxt̪aː]), meaning "rough mixture". The more formal register of Urdū is sometimes referred to as zabān-e-Urdu-e-mo'alla (زبانِ اردوِ معلہ, [zəba:n e: ʊrd̪uː eː moəllaː]), the "Language of Camp and Court". The etymology of the word used in the Urdū language for the most part decides how polite or refined your speech is. For example, Urdū speakers would distinguish between پانی pānī and آب āb, both meaning "water" for example, or between آدمی ādmi and مرد mard, meaning "man". The former in each set is used colloquially and has older Hindustani origins, while the latter is used formally and poetically, being of Persian origin. 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 Urdū, the level of speech is also considered more formal and grand. If a word is inherited from Sanskrit, the level of speech is considered more colloquial and personal. PolitenessUrdū is supposed to be very subtle and a host of words are used to show respect and politeness. This emphasis on politeness, which is reflected in the vocabulary, is known as takalluf in Urdū. These words are generally used when addressing elders, or people with whom one is not acquainted. For example, the English pronoun 'you' can be translated into three words in Urdū the singular forms tu (informal, extremely intimate, or derogatory) and tum (informal and showing intimacy called "apna pun" in Urdū) and the plural form āp (formal and respectful). Similarly, verbs, for example, "come," can be translated with degrees of formality in three ways:
VocabularyUrdū 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 small number of borrowings from 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
Image:Urdu alphabets.png The Urdū Nasta’liq alphabet, with names in the Devanāgarī and Latin alphabets Nowadays, Urdū is generally written right-to left in an extension of the Persian alphabet, which is itself an extension of the Arabic alphabet. Urdū is associated with the Nasta’liq style of Arabic calligraphy, whereas Arabic is generally written in the modernized Naskh style. Nasta’liq is notoriously difficult to typeset, so Urdū newspapers were hand-written by masters of calligraphy, known as katib or khush-navees, until the late 1980s. Historically, Urdū was also written in the Kaithi script. A highly-Persianized and technical form of Urdū was the lingua franca of the law courts of the British administration in Bengal, Bihar, and the North-West Provinces & Oudh. Until the late 19th century, all proceedings and court transactions in this register of Urdū was written officially in the Persian script. In 1880, Sir Ashley Eden, the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal abolished the use of the Persian alphabet in the law courts of Bengal and Bihar and ordered the exclusive use of Kaithi, a popular script used for both Urdū and Hindi[18] Kaithi's association with Urdū and Hindi was ultimately eliminated by the political contest between these languages and their scripts, in which the Persian script was definitively linked to Urdū. More recently in India, Urdū speakers have adopted Devanagari for publishing Urdu periodicals and have innovated new strategies to mark Urdū in Devanagari as distinct from Hindi in Devanagari[19] The popular Urdū monthly magazine, महकता आंचल (Mahakta Anchal), is published in Delhi in Devanagari in order to target the generation of Muslim boys and girls who do not know the Persian script. Such publishers have introduced new orthographic features into Devanagari for the purpose of representing Urdū sounds. One example is the use of अ (Devanagari a) with vowel signs to mimic contexts of ع (‘ain). To Urdū publishers, the use of Devanagari gives them a greater audience, but helps them to preserve the distinct identity of Urdū when written in Devanagari. The Daily Jang was the first Urdū newspaper to be typeset digitally in Nasta’liq by computer. There are efforts underway to develop more sophisticated and user-friendly Urdū support on computers and the Internet. Nowadays, nearly all Urdū newspapers, magazines, journals, and periodicals are composed on computers via various Urdū software programs. In India, ghazals are often found transliterated into Devanāgarī, as an aid for those Hindī-speakers, who can comprehend Urdū, but cannot read the Perso-Arabic script. A list of the Urdū alphabet and pronunciation is given below. Urdū contains many historical spellings from Arabic and Persian, and therefore has many irregularities. The Arabic letters yaa and haa are split into two in Urdū: one of the yaa variants is used at the ends of words for the sound [i], 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 (to'e) above the corresponding dental consonants. Several letters which represent distinct consonants in Arabic are conflated in Persian, and this has carried over to Urdū.
TransliterationUrdū is occasionally also written in the Roman script. Roman Urdū 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 Urdū 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 Urdū-speaking people around the world are using Romanised Urdū 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 Urdū. They both speak 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 Urdū but can’t write it in the traditional Arabic script and thus Roman Urdū is a blessing for such a population."[citation needed] Roman Urdū also holds significance among the Christians of North India. Urdū was the dominant native language among Christians of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan in the early part of 1900s and is still used by some people in these Indian states. Indian Christians often used the Roman script for writing Urdū. Thus Roman Urdū was a common way of writing among Indian Christians in these states up to the 1960s. The Bible Society of India publishes Roman Urdū Bibles which enjoyed sale late into the 1960s (though they are still published today). Church songbooks are also common in Roman Urdū. However, the usage of Roman Urdū is declining with the wider use of Hindi and English in these states. The major Hindi-Urdu South Asian film industries, Bollywood and Lollywood, are also noteworthy for their use of Roman Urdū for their movie titles. Usually, bare transliterations of Urdū into Roman letters omit many phonemic elements that have no equivalent in English or other languages commonly written in the Latin alphabet. It should be noted that a comprehensive system has emerged with specific notations to signify non-English sounds, but it can only be properly read by someone already familiar with Urdū, 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 who understand the language but without knowledge of their written forms to communicate with each other. Also see Roman Urdū. Examples
Sample text
The following is a sample text in zabān-e urdū-e muʻallā (formal Urdū), of the Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (by the United Nations):
Note: *('s) represents a possessive case which when written is preceded by the possessor and followed by the possessed, unlike the English 'of'. Common difficulties faced in learning Urdū
LiteratureUrdū 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, Urdū literature boasts some world-recognised artists and a considerable corpus. ProseReligiousAfter Arabic and Persian, Urdū holds the largest collection of work on Islamic literature and Sharia. These include translations and interpretation of Qur'an, commentary on Hadith, Fiqh, history, spirituality, Sufism and metaphysics. A great number of classical texts from Arabic and Persian, have also been translated into Urdū. Relatively inexpensive publishing, combined with the use of Urdū as a lingua franca among Muslims of South Asia, has meant that Islam-related works in Urdū far outnumber such works in any other South Asian language. Two of the most popular Islamic books, originally written in Urdū, are the Fazail-e-Amal and the Bahar-e-Shariat. LiterarySecular prose includes all categories of widely known fiction and non-fiction work, separable into genres. The dāstān, or tale, a traditional story which may have many characters and complex plotting. This has now fallen into disuse. The afsāna, or short story, probably the best-known genre of Urdū fiction. The best-known afsāna writers, or afsāna nigār, in Urdū are Saadat Hasan Manto, Qurat-ul-Ain Haider, Munshi Premchand, Ismat Chughtai, Krishan Chander, Ghulam Abbas, Banu Qudsia and Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi. Munshi Premchand, became known as a pioneer in the afsāna, though some contend that his were not technically the first as Sir Ross Masood had already written many short stories in Urdū. Novels form a genre of their own, in the tradition of the English novel. Other genres include saférnāma (i.e: Odyssey, lit: travel story), mazmoon (i.e: Essay), sarguzisht, inshaeya, murasela, and khud navvisht (i.e: Autobiography). PoetryImage:Ghalib.gif Mirza Ghalib (1796-1869), a respected poet of Urdū. Urdū has been the premier language of poetry in South Asia for two centuries, and has developed a rich tradition in a variety of poetic genres. The 'Ghazal' in Urdū represents the most popular form of subjective poetry, while the 'Nazm' exemplifies the objective kind, often reserved for narrative, descriptive, didactic or satirical purposes. Under the broad head of the Nazm we may also include the classical forms of poems known by specific names such as 'Masnavi' (a long narrative poem in rhyming couplets on any theme: romantic, religious, or didactic), 'Marsia' (an elegy traditionally meant to commemorate the martyrdom of Hazrat Imam Hussain, grandson of Prophet Muhammad, and his comrades of the Karbala fame), or 'Qasida' (a panegyric written in praise of a king or a nobleman), for all these poems have a single presiding subject, logically developed and concluded. However, these poetic species have an old world aura about their subject and style, and are different from the modern Nazm, supposed to have come into vogue in the later part of the nineteenth century.
Foreign forms such as the sonnet, azad nazm (a.k.a Free verse) and haiku have also been used by some modern Urdū poets. Probably the most widely recited, and memorised genre of contemporary Urdū poetry is naat—panegyric poetry written in praise of the Prophet Muhammad. Nāt can be of any formal category, but is most commonly in the ghazal form. The language used in Urdū nāt ranges from the intensely colloquial to a highly Persianised formal language. The great early twentieth century scholar Imam Ahmad Raza Khan, who wrote many of the most well known nāts in Urdū, epitomised this range in a ghazal of nine stanzas (bayt) in which every stanza contains half a line each of Arabic, Persian, formal Urdū, and colloquial Hindi. The same poet composed a salām—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—Mustafā Jān-e Rahmat, which, due to being recited on Fridays in some Urdū speaking mosques throughout the world, is probably the more frequently recited Urdū poems of the modern era. Another important genre of Urdū 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. Urdū poetry terminologyAsh'ār (اشعار) (Couplet). It consists of two lines, Misra (مصرعہ); first line is called Misra-e-oola (مصرع اولی) and the second is called 'Misra-e-sānī' (مصرعہ ثانی). Each verse embodies a single thought or subject (sing) She'r (شعر). HistoryUrdū developed as local Indo-Aryan dialects came under the influence of the Muslim courts that ruled South Asia from the early thirteenth century. 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 Persian, while t | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
