Hindi and Urdu are generally considered to be one spoken language with two different literary traditions. That means that Hindi and Urdu speakers who shop in the same markets have no problems understanding each other -- they'd both say yeh kitne kaa hay for 'How much is it? And the Urdu one will be یہ کتنے کا ہے؟ Hindi is written from left to right in the Devanagari script, and is the official language of India, along with English. Urdu, on the other hand, is written from right to left in the Nastaliq script and is the national language of Pakistan. It's also one of the official languages of the Indian states of Bihar and Jammu & Kashmir.
Considered as one, these tongues constitute the second most spoken language in the world, sometimes called Hindustani. In their daily lives, Hindi and Urdu speakers communicate in their 'different' languages without major problems. Both Hindi and Urdu developed from Classical Sanskrit, which appeared in the Indus Valley at about the start of the Common Era. The first old Hindi poetry was written in the year 769 AD, and by the European Middle Ages it became known as 'Hindvi'. Muslim Turks invaded the Punjab in 1027 and took control of Delhi in 1193. They paved the way for the Islamic Mughal Empire, which ruled northern India from the 16th century until it was defeated by the British Raj in the mid-19th century.
It was at this time that the language of this book began to take form, a mixture of Hindvi grammar with Arabic, Persian and Turkish vocabulary. The Muslim speakers of Hindvi began to write in the Arabic script, creating Urdu, while the Hindu population incorporated the new words but continued to write in Devanagari script. Hindi is the official language of the Republic of India (projected to overtake China as the world's most populous nation by 2030) and the most widely spoken language in South Asia. It is also the language of a long literary tradition, both in modern prose and poetry, as well as pre-modern secular and devotional poetry.
It is also a tremendously important language strategically in South Asia.In their basic form Hindi and Urdu are generally considered to be the same language written in two different scripts. After one year of instruction, you could go to India or Pakistan and talk about yourself, where you were born, where you grew up, what you do, your interests and your attraction to South Asia and South Asian languages. Each lesson builds on previous lessons in a systematic way to allow the absorption of vocabulary words in an organic manner, while reinforcing grammatical structures.
The text is accompanied by a CD as well, and a supplementary text introduces Urdu script quickly and painlessly. Films are also shown occasionally in class to reinforce the structures and idiomatic expressions that are being taught. It is also very closely related to the scripts employed to write Punjabi, Bengali, Gujarati, and Oriya among others. Urdu, which was often referred to by the British administrators in India as the Hindustani language, was promoted in colonial India by British policies to counter the previous emphasis on Persian.
Does Everyone In Pakistan Speak Urdu Urdu replaced Persian as the official language of India in 1837 and was made co-official, along with English. The first language of around 70 million people and spoken as a second language by over 100 million people, mostly in Pakistan and India, in the world, Urdu is one of the oldest and most popular members of the Indo-European family of languages. The history of the Urdu language dates back to as early as the 12th century AD. Widely spoken and understood across the globe, it is the national language of Pakistan whereas English remains the official language of the state. By the 19th century, poetry written in Urdu was stimulated by socialist nationalist, pan-Islamic feeling, and writers and poets from Punjab as well as the areas of Delhi and Lucknow began to contribute.
Before I post the map, I'm going to give a quick rundown on language in Pakistan. English and Urdu are the national languages, and are widely understood, at least by the educated. English, obviously, is nobody's first language in Pakistan, and Urdu is the first language of about 7% of the population, mostly descendents of immigrants from north India who arrived in 1947. The most widely spoken tongue by far is Punjabi, which is the first language of slightly less than half the population. When Saraiki and Hindko, two Punjabi dialects that are sometimes classified as separate languages, are included, well over half of Pakistanis speak Punjabi or a closely related language. As anyone who read my post on the partition of Punjab will know, a large population of Punjabis live across the border in India.
The second most widely spoken language is Pashto, which unlike Punjabi, an Indo-Aryan language related to Hindi, is an Iranian language. This makes it a relative of Farsi and Kurdish, although Pashto's closest relatives are a cluster of minor languages known as the Pamir languages which are spoken on the mountainous border between eastern Tajikistan and northeastern Afghanistan. It is the dominant language in southern Afghanistan, but the majority of Pashtuns live in Pakistan.
Right behind Pashto at 14% is Sindhi, which is a relative of Punjabi. There are a few million Sindhi speakers in India as well, some right on the opposite side of the border, and some Hindus who fled Sindh after Partition. The other major regional language is Balochi, spoken by by about 4%. Balochi, like Pashto, is an Iranian language, though it is not particularly closely related. It is actually closer to Kurdish, leading to the theory that the Baloch may have migrated to their current location fairly recently from the Middle East.
Balochi is also spoken in southern Afghanistan and eastern Iran. There are some other minor languages, which I'll discuss later, but those are the major languages. Urdu 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 the language of religion was Arabic. Most of the Sultans and nobility in the Sultanate period were Persianized Turks from Central Asia who spoke Turkish as their mother tongue.
The Mughals were also from Persianized Central Asia, but spoke Turkish as their first language; however the Mughals later adopted Persian. Persian became the preferred language of the Muslim elite of north India before the Mughals entered the scene. Babur's mother tongue was Turkish and he wrote exclusively in Turkish. His son and successor Humayun also spoke and wrote in Turkish. Muzaffar Alam, a noted scholar of Mughal and Indo-Persian history, suggests that Persian became the lingua franca of the empire under Akbar for various political and social factors due to its non-sectarian and fluid nature.
The mingling of these languages led to a vernacular that is the ancestor of today's Urdu. 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, Karachi, Lucknow, and Lahore. Standard Urdu has approximately the twentieth largest population of native speakers, among all languages.
It is the national language of Pakistan, as well as one of the twenty-three official languages of India. Urdu is often contrasted with Hindi, another standardized form of Hindustani. Linguists nonetheless consider Urdu and Hindi to be two standardized forms of the same language. Hopefully this map underscores how linguistically diverse Pakistan is, and possibly explains why the country is so fragmented.
Two other features worth noting are the huge swath of northern Balochistan that is Pashto speaking. It is also worth noting the tiny presence of Urdu, the national language. While most educated people in Pakistan can speak Urdu, and almost everyone has at least a rudimentary knowledge of it, very few people speak it as a first language.
Only the Sindhi cities of Hyderabad and Karachi are majority Urdu speaking. Punjab would have been a more logical destination given Lahore's traditional position as the most important city in northwest India, but Punjab was already overrun with Muslim refugees from India. Sindh wasn't partitioned, which means it had to absorb fewer refugees. That might explain why the powerful Urdu-speaking community chose the cities of this arid backwater province as their new home. Hindi is the official language of the Republic of India and the most widely spoken language in South Asia.
Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, one of the official languages of India, and a tremendously important strategic language in South Asia. With a common vocabulary and grammar, in their basic form, Hindi and Urdu are generally considered to be the same language written in two different scripts. Punjabi, Saraiki and Pashto are languages spoken in Punjab and Khyber PakhtunkhwaPunjabi, which often spelled as Panjabi, is counted among the most common Indo-Aryan languages in today's world. In Pakistan, Punjabi language is spoken by around 70 million souls, mostly in Punjab province.
However, the status of the official language of Punjab is reserved for Urdu. As spoken in both India and Pakistan, Punjabi is a language of many dialects. Written in Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts, the dialects of the language doesn't have much difference between them and sound quite similar. Dialects of Punjabi spoken in India are Majhi, Doabi, Pwadhi and Malwi. However, in Pakistan, the chief dialects are Pothohari, Hindko, Majhi and Multani.
Since Majhi is used to form the standard for writing in Punjabi, it is considered the most important dialect of Punjabi in the country. Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and is spoken and understood throughout the country, where it shares official language status with English. It holds in itself a repository of the cultural, religious and social heritage of the country.
Although English is used in most elite circles, and Punjabi has a plurality of native speakers, Urdu is the lingua franca and is expected to prevail. 15 million people in Pakistan (8% of the population) speak Urdu as their first language, and over 90% rely on it to communicate. But the education system teaches its students the country's national language as if it were a foreign one, and completely forgets the regional languages spoken in various parts of Pakistan. Around one-third of Pakistani students attend private schools, where English is the first language.
Almost all countries that I know of are nation states that use their national languages-majority language- up to the highest levels in all disciplines and teach one or two international languages as well. In many countries a level of importance is also accorded to regional or minority languages. Linguistic abilities are pretty poor in the country and it is probably late in the day to try to put things on the right track.
Note that I colored the Saraiki and Hindko speaking areas shades of blue because it remains undetermined whether they are separate languages or dialects of Punjabi. Since I don't speak any of these languages, I can't make a determination for myself, so I split the difference by making them different shades of the same dark blue. One is the central Balochistan area, which is traditionally considered the Brahui zone. It is Dravidian, which means that it is related to the major South Indian languages, such as Tamil and Telugu, but it is spoken far away from the other Dravidian languages. Another is that the Brahui learn both Balochi and Brahui and are equally comfortable in both, leading most to identify the dominant Balochi language as their native tongue.
According to some sources, the Brahui have a complicated system of code-switching in which people use Brahui in some situations and Balochi in other situations. Apparently, even within families, there are some times Balochi is used , and other times Brahui is used . The father speaks to the children in the language of the mother, and wives address their husbands in Balochi. This all seems crazy, but if true could explain why many Brahui would feel comfortable calling Balochi their native language. In any case, it seems that almost all Brahui are fluent in Balochi. Just as a side note, Ethnologue say Brahui is spoken by four million people.
This is a ludicrous number, implying that Balochistan, which has 7 million people, is majority Brahui-speaking. Hindko is another ancient language spoken in Pakistan that belongs to the group of Indo-Aryan languages. The speakers of Hinko are Hindkowan people, mostly living in the northern areas of Pakistan. According to linguistic experts, the name of the language is actually a merger of two words where "Hind" means Sindh and "ko" means language. As per the historical records, when the invaders came from Afghanistan to this area, they gave this name to the local language, which was being spoken from Peshawar to UP at that time. There has been a debate about Hindko as some people consider it as a dialect of Sindhi while others call it one of the lesser known dialects of Punjabi language.
In Pakistan, Pashto, the official language of neighboring Afghanistan, Pakistanis speaking Pashto who lives in Quetta and Peshawar. This Pakistani language is spoken by more than 15.42 percent of the country's population. Pashto speakers are primarily found in Pakistan's northern Balochistan, Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa provinces. This language is also used amongst Pashtun groups in the country's cities.
Khushal Khan Khattak, Rahman Baba, Khatir Afridi, and Ghani Khan are just a few famous poets written in Pashto. Urdu is a Central Indo-Aryan language that is the official national language of Pakistan and is one of India's many constitutionally recognized official languages. It is spoken by approximately 70 million people worldwide natively. Urdu is Pakistan's lingua franca, and while only 7% of Pakistanis speak Urdu natively, most Pakistanis understand Urdu and speak it as a second language. Urdu is a member of the Indo-Aryan family of languages , 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 Urdu are considered to be the same language (Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu), then Urdu can be considered to be a part of a dialect continuum which extends across eastern Iran, Afghanistan and modern Pakistan, right into eastern India. These idioms all have similar grammatical structures and share a large portion of their vocabulary. In Pakistan, Urdu is spoken and understood by a majority of urban dwellers in such cities as Karachi, Lahore, Rawalpindi/Islamabad, Abbottabad, Faisalabad, Hyderabad, Multan, Peshawar, Gujranwala, Sialkot, Sukkur and Sargodha. Urdu is used as the official language in all provinces of Pakistan. It is also taught as a compulsory language up to high school in both the English and Urdu medium school systems.
This has produced millions of Urdu speakers whose mother tongue is one of the regional languages of Pakistan such as Punjabi, Hindku, Sindhi, Pashto, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Balochi, Siraiki, and Brahui. Millions of Pakistanis whose mother tongue is not Urdu can read and write Urdu, but can only speak their mother tongue. Saraiki is an Indo-Aryan language of the Lahnda group, spoken in the south-western half of the province of Punjab. Saraiki is to a high degree mutually intelligible with standard Punjabi and shares with it a large portion of its vocabulary and morphology. At the same time in its phonology it is radically different , and has important grammatical features in common with the Sindhi language spoken to the south.
Saraiki is the first language of about 20 million people in Pakistan, its territory ranges across southern Punjab, parts of southern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, and some border regions of northern Sindh and eastern Balochistan. Some who are from a non-Urdu background now can read and write only Urdu. With such a large number of people speaking Urdu, the language has acquired a peculiar Pakistani flavour further distinguishing it from the Urdu spoken by native speakers, resulting in more diversity within the language. No region in Pakistan uses Urdu as its mother tongue, though it is spoken as the first language of Muslim migrants in Pakistan who left India after independence in 1947. Other communities, most notably the Punjabi elite of Pakistan, have adopted Urdu as a mother tongue and identify with both an Urdu speaker as well as Punjabi identity.
Urdu was chosen as a symbol of unity for the new state of Pakistan in 1947, because it had already served as a lingua franca among Muslims in north and northwest British India. It is written, spoken and used in all provinces/territories of Pakistan, and together with English as the main languages of instruction, although the people from differing provinces may have different native languages. For 8 hundred years it was the official language of Indian Muslim states. Lord Macauly banned Farsi to cut off relations of Indian Muslims with Afghanistan, Turkistan, Iran and Turkey and imposed Indian vernacular Hindi/Urdu which was one and the same language before British occupation.
Moreover Urdu is not the mother tongue of any native ethnic group or region of Pakistan. If we want to ged rid of Indian culture of Bollywood, we must revert to our Historical Language Farsi in which our fore fathers were educated. They used to learn, speak and write in Farsi instead of Urdu or any other Indian language. The Urdu language is one of the most beautiful sounding languages you can learn, and it is why Urdu is still a preferred medium of poetry and prose even by non-native speakers.
