Urdu

Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language spoken primarily in South Asia. It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also an official Eighth Schedule language in India, the status and cultural heritage of which are recognised by the Constitution of India. It also has an official status in several Indian states.
Urdu and Hindi share a common, predominantly Sanskrit- and Prakrit-derived, vocabulary base, phonology, syntax, and grammar, making them mutually intelligible during colloquial communication. The common base of the two languages is sometimes referred to as the Hindi–Urdu or Hindustani language, and Urdu has been described as a Persianised standard register of the Hindustani language. While formal Urdu draws literary, political, and technical vocabulary from Persian, formal Hindi draws these aspects from Sanskrit; consequently, the two languages' mutual intelligibility effectively decreases as the level of formality increases.
Urdu originated geographically in the upper Ganga-Yamuna doab, in and around the Delhi region, where Khari Boli was spoken. Urdu shared a grammatical foundation with Khari Boli, but was written in a revised Perso-Arabic script and included vocabulary borrowed from Persian and Arabic, which retained its original grammatical structure in those languages. In 1837, Urdu became an official language of the British East India Company, replacing Persian across northern India during Company rule; Persian had until this point served as the court language of various Indo-Islamic empires.
According to 2022 estimates by Ethnologue and the CIA's The World Factbook, Urdu is the 10th-most widely spoken language in the world, with million total speakers, including those who speak it as a second language.

Etymology

The name Urdu was first used by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780 for the language, even though he himself also used Hindavi term in his poetry to define the language. Ordu means army in the Turkic languages. In late 18th century, it was known as Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla '''' means language of the exalted camp. It was previously known by several terms such as Hindvi, Hindi, Hindustani and Rekhta.

History

Origins

Urdu is a part of the Hindi–Urdu linguistic continuum, which is commonly referred to as Hindustani in contemporary usage. Some linguists have suggested that the earliest forms of Urdu evolved from the medieval Apabhraṃśa register of the preceding Shauraseni language, a Middle Indo-Aryan language that is also the ancestor of other modern Indo-Aryan languages. In the Delhi region of India, the native language was Khariboli, whose earliest form is known as Old Hindi. It belongs to the Western Hindi group of the Central Indo-Aryan languages. The contact of Hindu and Muslim cultures during the period of Muslim conquests in the Indian subcontinent led to the development of Hindustani as a product of a composite Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb.
In cities such as Delhi, the ancient language Old Hindi began to acquire many Persian loanwords and continued to be called "Hindi" and later, also "Hindustani". An early literary tradition of Hindavi was founded by Amir Khusrau in the late 13th century, who has been called "the father of Urdu literature". After the conquest of the Deccan, and a subsequent immigration of noble Muslim families into the south, a form of the language flourished in medieval India as a vehicle of poetry,, and is known as Dakhini, which contains loanwords from Telugu and Marathi.
From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century; the language now known as Urdu was called Hindi, Hindavi, Hindustani, Dehlavi, Dihlawi, Lahori, and Lashkari. The Delhi Sultanate established Persian as its official language in India, a policy continued by the Mughal Empire, which extended over most of northern South Asia from the 16th to 18th centuries and cemented Persian influence on Hindustani.
According to the Navadirul Alfaz by Khan-i Arzu, the "Zaban-e Urdu-e Shahi" had attained special importance in the time of Alamgir". By the end of the reign of Aurangzeb in the early 1700s, the common language around Delhi began to be referred to as Zaban-e-Urdu, a name derived from the Turkic word ordu or orda and is said to have arisen as the "language of the camp", or "Zaban-i-Ordu" means "Language of High camps" or natively "Lashkari Zaban" means "Language ''of Army" even though term Urdu held different meanings at that time. It is recorded that Aurangzeb spoke in Hindvi, which was most likely Persianised, as there are substantial evidence that Hindvi was written in the Persian script in this period.
During this time period, Urdu was referred to as "Moors", which simply meant Muslim, by European writers. John Ovington wrote in 1689:

The language of the Moors is different from that of the ancient original inhabitants of India but is obliged to these Gentiles for its characters. For though the Moors dialect is peculiar to themselves, yet it is destitute of Letters to express it; and therefore, in all their Writings in their Mother Tongue, they borrow their letters from the Heathens, or from the Persians, or other Nations.

In 1715, a complete literary Diwan in Rekhta was written by Nawab Sadruddin Khan. An Urdu-Persian dictionary was written by Khan-i Arzu in 1751 in the reign of Ahmad Shah Bahadur. The name Urdu was first introduced by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780. As a literary language, Urdu took shape in courtly, elite settings. While Urdu retained the grammar and core Indo-Aryan vocabulary of the local Indian dialect Khariboli, it adopted the Perso-Arab writing system, written in the Nastaleeq style. – which was developed as a style of Persian calligraphy.
Urdu was patronised by the Nawab of Awadh and in Lucknow, the language was refined, being not only spoken in the court, but by the common people in the city—both Hindus and Muslims; the city of Lucknow gave birth to Urdu prose literature, with a notable novel being Umrao Jaan Ada''.

Other historical names

Throughout the history of the language, Urdu has been referred to by several other names: Hindi, Hindavi, Rekhta, Urdu-e-Muallah, Dakhini, Moors and Dehlavi.
In 1773, the Swiss French soldier Antoine Polier notes that the English liked to use the name "Moors" for Urdu:

I have a deep knowledge of the common tongue of India, called Moors by the English, and Ourdouzebain by the natives of the land.

Several works of Sufi writers like Ashraf Jahangir Semnani used similar names for the Urdu language. Shah Abdul Qadir Raipuri was the first person who translated The Quran into Urdu.
During Shahjahan's time, the Capital was relocated to Delhi and named Shahjahanabad and the Bazar of the town was named Urdu e Muallah.
In the Akbar era, the word Rekhta was used to describe Urdu for the first time. It was originally a Persian word that meant "to create a mixture". Amir Khusrau was the first person to use the same word for Poetry.

Colonial period

Before the standardisation of Urdu into colonial administration, British officers often referred to the language as "Moors" or "Moorish jargon". John Gilchrist was the first in British India to begin a systematic study on Urdu and began to use the term "Hindustani" what the majority of Europeans called "Moors", authoring the book The Strangers's East Indian Guide to the Hindoostanee or Grand Popular Language of India .
Urdu was promoted in colonial India by British policies to counter the previous emphasis on Persian, and the language also gained official status in colonial India because it was the language of the Muslim elite. Religious, social, and political factors arose during the European colonial period in India that advocated a distinction between Urdu and Hindi, leading to the Hindi–Urdu controversy. In colonial India, ordinary Muslims and Hindus alike spoke the same language in the United Provinces in the nineteenth century, namely Hindustani, whether called by that name or whether called Hindi, Urdu, or one of the regional dialects such as Braj or Awadhi. Elites from Muslim communities, as well as a minority of Hindu elites, such as Munshis of Hindu origin, wrote the language in the Perso-Arabic script in courts and government offices, though Hindus continued to employ the Devanagari script in certain literary and religious contexts. Through the late 19th century, people did not view Urdu and Hindi as being two distinct languages, though in urban areas, the standardised Hindustani language was increasingly being referred to as Urdu and written in the Perso-Arabic script. Urdu and English replaced Persian as the official languages in northern parts of India in 1837. Hindus in northwestern India, under the Arya Samaj agitated against the sole use of the Perso-Arabic script and argued that the language should be written in the native Devanagari script, which triggered a backlash against the use of Hindi written in Devanagari by the Anjuman-e-Islamia of Lahore.
Advocacy for a standardised Hindi, based on Khari Boli, which would have equal official recognition did not begin until the 1860s, Proponents of Hindi over Urdu as an authorised language also had to take into account the existence of numerous provincial languages such as Awadhi, Braj Bhasha, Bhojpuri, Bundeli, and Maithili, which were considered a part of older Hindi, but which would problematise dialogues for an official, modern standard Hindi. Modern Standard Hindi did not emerge before the 20th century. The recognition of the Hindi script as an official script of courts in North India in 1900 was a key juncture in the evolution of Hindi-based language nationalism. Hindi, which was still not altogether standardised by the 1910s, and which had hitherto been considered an unrefined language was strictly patrolled to deliver a Sanskritic lexicon that did not permit influence of Urdu to be evident, Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi notably preparing the spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary of Modern Standard Hindi.
The Hindi-Urdu controversy in 1867, highlighted the linguistic and cultural divide between Hindus and Muslims in British India, with Urdu emerging as a symbol of the linguistic pride of Indian Muslims. This division played an important role in the political movement of Muslims, eventually leading to the formation of the All-India Muslim League in 1906, whose formation eventually resulted in the creation of Pakistan, as a separate Muslim state in the Indian subcontinent. The controversy began to emerge when certain Hindu leaders and organisations, including the Banaras Institute and the Allahabad Institute, advocated for replacing Urdu with Hindi as the official language. This firm stance contributed to prompting Sir Syed Ahmed Khan—who was an advocate of the Hindu-Muslim unity, but later known as the 'Father of Two-nation theory'—to advocate for the use of Urdu. He regarded Urdu as a symbol of Muslim heritage in the Indian subcontinent. Sir Syed also considered Urdu "a common legacy of Hindus and Muslims", and supported the use of Urdu through his writings. Under Sir Syed, the Scientific Society of Aligarh translated Western works only into Urdu. The Urdu movement, which was a sociopolitical movement aimed at making Urdu as the universal lingua-franca of the Muslims of the subcontinent was fuelled by Aligarh movement of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan. This movement strongly influenced the Muslim League and the Pakistan Movement.
During the 1937 Lucknow session of the All-India Muslim League, the Raja of Mahmudabad, Mohammad Amir Ahmed Khan encouraged Urdu-speaking communities in British India to actively support and safeguard the Urdu language using all possible means.
Liaquat Ali Khan, who was later the first prime minister of Pakistan, stated in 1939: 'We left Arabic language for this India and for the Hindus, we left Turkish language and adopted a language which came into existence and made progress in this country – a language which is not spoken anywhere else. Now, it is demanded of us that we should speak the language of Balmeek. We have taken many steps forward for the sake of Hindu-Muslim unity. We shall not now take another step forward. We are standing at the edge of our limit. Anyone who wishes to meet us should come here'. On 31 December 1939, Sayyid Sulaiman Nadvi, while delivering his presidential address at the Urdu Muslim Conference in Calcutta, said, "In the brightness of the modern-daylight, something darkly unfair is being done and which is that every government official from top to bottom is engaged in doing his utmost in promoting the cause of Hindi. In my opinion, it is a disfavour to the Congress rather than a favour; it is reinforcing the misconception in the minds of the Muslims that it is what we can do with half the powers, what else we will do with full powers; as a result of which the country will be divided into two parts." A renowned Congressite, Tufail Ahmad Manglori, once acknowledged that the passage of a resolution against Urdu in the United Provinces caused deep distress among Muslims. He noted that the Hindi-Urdu controversy contributed to increasing divisions between the two communities, which continued to widen over time. Before the establishment of Pakistan, many Muslims of colonial India actively supported Urdu as their national language, and the language emerged as a symbol of unity during the Pakistan Movement by demonstrating that it possessed all the essential traits to affirm the need for a separate state for the Muslims of colonial India.
British language policy played a role in shaping political developments that eventually led to the partition of colonial India into India and Pakistan. This outcome was paralleled by the linguistic divide of the Hindi-Urdu continuum, with the emergence of Sanskritised Hindi and Urdu adopting more Persian influences.
Urdu had been used as a literary medium for British colonial Indian writers from the Bombay, Bengal, Orissa, and Hyderabad State as well.