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| VOCABULARY DATABASE > URDU > INFORMATION |
Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by some 50 million speakers in Pakistan and northern India. At a colloquial level, it is virtually the same language as Hindi, although the literary forms of the two languages are mutually incomprehensible, due to the strong influence of Sanskrit on Hindi and Persian and Arabic on Urdu.
Hindi and Urdu evolved from the Khari Boli dialect, which came to be used as a lingua franca throughout India (and present-day Pakistan) under British rule. While the earliest evidence of literature in Khari Boli goes back to the 10th c., it did not become a literary language until the end of the 17th c. On the other hand, Urdu poetry developed from the 16th c., and Urdu prose from the 19th c.
Urdu is written in a variant of the Arabic script.
Urdu is an inflected language. Grammar is virtually the same as in Hindi, although literary Urdu uses certain Persian and Arabic constructions. The language lost six of eight cases of Sanscrit (from which it is ultimately descended), and endings were replaced by postpositions. The verb system was also simplified: only the present and future forms are fully conjugated, while other tenses are based on participial forms.
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