Urdu

Urdu (pronunciation , اردو, trans. Urdū, 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 on apabhramshas in South Asia during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1526–1858 AD).

Urdu is a standardised register of Hindustani termed khaṛībolī, that emerged as a standard dialect. 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.

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 23 official languages of India.

Urdu is often contrasted with Hindi, another standardised form of Hindustani. The main differences between the two are that Standard Urdu is conventionally written in Nastaliq calligraphy style of the Perso-Arabic script and draws vocabulary more heavily from Persian than Hindi, while Standard Hindi is conventionally written in Devanāgarī and draws vocabulary from Sanskrit comparatively more heavily. Linguists therefore consider Urdu and Hindi to be two standardized forms of the same language.