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In Urdu
What is Urdu?
Urdu is an Indo-European language - it is the national language of Pakistan and one of 23 national languages spoken in India. It's a written variant of Hindustani. The lan…guage itself was born out of the Delhi court during the eras of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire. It emerged as a result of Persian language, which was spoken by the Persian and Turkic nobility and the rulers of that time, mixing with local Hindi variant (Hindi itself being derived from Sanskrit). Urdu also contains many Arabic words, most of which were passed on through Persian. The pronunciation of most Persian and Arabic terms is based on eastern Persian dialects with local accentuation, of course. Urdu is considered a very poetic language, as is Persian. Also like Persian, Urdu is written from right to left in a modified Arabic script. It contains several characters for sounds not found in neither Arabic nor Persian. Footnote: Urdu is listed in the World Almanac & Book of Facts 2007 as one of the several official languages of India. The same source gives Hindustani as a mix of Hindi and Urdu; Hindustani is a popular language in the north of India. It is important to note that many scholars consider Urdu and Hindi to be variants of the same language, due to the fact that they're very much mutually intelligible. Standard Urdu of Pakistan is considered highly Persianized and Arabicized, while on the other side of the scale, standard Hindi is considered highly Sanskritized. Both languages have gone through stringent standardization process whereby distancing themselves from each other. In colloquial speech, also known as Hindustani, the two are much more mutually intelligible. The main difference that one might notice between the two is that Urdu is written in Arabic script, while Hindi is written in Devanagari script. (MORE)
