Urdu (The National Language Of Pakistan)

Introduction

Urdu enjoys the status of being the mother tongue of 80 millions people of the world, mostly residing in two countries Pakistan and India. It also enjoys the status of being the national language of Pakistan and one of the national languages of India. It is also the official language of different states of India like Utter Pradesh, Indian controlled Jammu and Kashmir, etc. It is spoken and understood in many countries of Asia, Africa and Europe and a large number of speakers are also present in USA and Australia. The total count of the people, who can speak and understand Urdu, is more than 200 millions. It is the 20th most populous natively spoken language.

Urdu belongs to the Indo-Aryan family and thus is an Indo-European language. It has developed in the present shape under the great influence of Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Punjabi, and other indigenous languages of Indian sub-continent during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire from 12th to 18th century.

Features of Urdu Script

Urdu is transcribed in the derivation of Persian alphabet that is by itself is a derivation of Arabic alphabet. It is read from right-to-left. The shape assumed by a character in a word is context sensitive. It contains 40 characters, 17 diacritical marks, 10 digits, etc. In Unicode, Arabic and its associative languages like Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi etc. have been allocated 1,200 code points (0600h - 06FFh, FB50h - FEFFh).

The distinguishing characteristics of Urdu are discussed for the benefit of the unacquainted reader. Urdu is greatly influenced by Arabic and Persian languages. Figure 1 shows the alphabets of Urdu.