Urdu Transcription Services

Urdu is a standardised register of the Hindustani language. It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, and an official language of six states of India. It is also one of the 22 official languages recognized in the Constitution of India.

Urdu is historically associated with the Muslims of the region of Hindustan. Apart from specialized vocabulary, Urdu is mutually intelligible with Standard Hindi, which is associated with the Hindu community.

The Urdu language received recognition and patronage under the British Raj when the British replaced the Persian and local official languages of North Indian Jammu and Kashmir state with the Urdu and English language in 1837.

Urdu formed from Khariboli—a Prakrit spoken in North India—by adding Persian and Arabic words to it. Around 99% of Urdu verbs have their roots in Sanskrit and Prakrit. But the word Urdu is derived from the same Turkic word ordu (army) that has given English horde.

However, Turkish borrowings in Urdu are minimal. The words that Urdu has borrowed from Turkish and Arabic have been borrowed through Farsi and hence are a Persianized version of the original word, for instance the Arabic teh marbuta ( ة ) changes to heh ( ه ) orteh ( ت ).[19].

The Mughal Empire’s official language was Persian, a continuation of the policy that had been established since the early days of the Turko-Afghan Delhi Sultanate and the introduction of Persian in the Indian Subcontinent by Central Asian Persianized Turkic invaders, amongst the most notable, Mahmud of Ghazni.

The basis in general for the introduction of Persian language into the subcontinent was set, from its earliest days, by various Persianized Central Asian Turkic and Afghan dynasties. With the advent of the British Raj Persian language was replaced by the Hindustani written in the Persian script and this script was used by both Hindus and Muslims.

The name Urdu was first used by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780. From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century Urdu was commonly known as Hindi.

The language was also known by various other names such as Hindavi and Dehlavi. The communal nature of the language lasted until it replaced Persian as the official language in 1837 and was made co-official, along with English.

Urdu was promoted in British India by British policies to counter the previous emphasis on Persian. This triggered a Hindu backlash in north-western India, which argued that the language should be written in the native Devanagari script.

Thus a new literary register, called “Hindi”, replaced traditional Hindustani as the official language of Bihar in 1881, establishing a sectarian divide of “Urdu” for Muslims and “Hindi” for Hindus, a divide that was formalized with the division of India and Pakistan after independence (though there are Hindu poets who continue to write in Urdu to this day, with post-independence examples including Gopi Chand Narang and Gulzar). At independence, Pakistan established a highly Persianized literary form of Urdu as its national language.

There have been attempts to “purify” Urdu and Hindi, by purging Urdu of Sanskrit loan words, and Hindi of Persian loan words, and new vocabulary draws primarily from Persian and Arabic for Urdu and from Sanskrit for Hindi.

This has primarily affected academic and literary vocabulary, and both national standards remain heavily influenced by both Persian and Sanskrit. English has exerted a heavy influence on both as a co-official language.

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