Hyderabad: Urdu is a Lashkari (mixed dialect). It is a Persianised standard register of Hindustani language.
It has 30 consonants, 20 vowels, two diphthongs; non-tonal; stress being on the penultimate syllable. Urdu is intelligible with Hindi, but its formal vocabulary is borrowed from Arabic and Persian. It’s Dakhini dialect has fewer Persian and Arabic loans than Urdu. Rekhta is a form of Urdu used in poetry.
Fresh data from the 2011 census says that Urdu is the seventh most spoken language in India. Over eight crore people speak Urdu in India alone. It is one of the 22 official languages recognised in the Constitution of India, having official status in Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Bengal and Delhi, while it has the status of official language of Jammu and Kashmir. Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and is a registered regional language of Nepal.
According to the 2018 edition of Ethnologue, a language reference published by SIL International, Urdu is the 11th most spoken language in the world with approximately 16.32 crore speakers.
Urdu is one of the most sophisticated languages, defining beauty and grace. It is so beautiful that it has a unique way of conveying an aura of elegance and gentility that mark the courteous from the unlearned and the noble from the ordinary. It is known to touch the soul the way it imparts hidden meanings in a prose or poetry like no other language can.
Urdu is a major language of South Asia and has been gaining popularity in UK, USA, France and Germany apart from the Gulf region. Urdu is also spoken in Guyana, Mauritius, Nepal and South Africa. More than one billion people speak Urdu all over the world.
Urdu language gained prevalence first in the South. Alauddin Hasan Bahmani, who set up the Bahmani kingdom by rebelling against Mohammed Tughlaq, played an important role in popularising Urdu in the Deccan. In Deccan, Urdu came into contact with Marathi, Telugu and Kanarese spoken by the local people. It is believed that one of the first treatises written in Urdu or Rekhta is ‘Meraj ul Aashiqeen’ by Khawaja Banda Nawaz Gesu Daraz whose shrine is in Gulbarga.
