Urdu · اردو

About Urdu

Language family

Indo-European, Indo-Aryan

Where it's spoken

Pakistan (national language) and India

Speakers

roughly 230 million speakers including second-language use

Urdu and Hindi share essentially the same grammar and everyday spoken vocabulary, to the point that linguists often describe them as one spoken language, Hindustani, split into two written and literary standards. Urdu draws its higher, formal vocabulary from Persian and Arabic and is written right to left in a modified Perso-Arabic script called Nastaliq, in contrast to Hindi's Devanagari. It carries a long, prestigious tradition of poetry, especially the ghazal form associated with Mughal-era court culture.