Urdu-language Plays

Urdu (;"Urdu"
'' Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. ur, , link=no, ) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the national language and ''lingua franca'' of Pakistan, where it is also an official language alongside English. In India, Urdu is an Eighth Schedule language whose status and cultural heritage is recognized by the Constitution of India; Quote: "The Eighth Schedule recognizes India's national languages as including the major regional languages as well as others, such as Sanskrit and Urdu, which contribute to India's cultural heritage. ... The original list of fourteen languages in the Eighth Schedule at the time of the adoption of the Constitution in 1949 has now grown to twenty-two." Quote: "As Mahapatra says: “It is generally believed that the significance for the Eighth Schedule lies in providing a list of languages from which Hindi is directed to draw the appropriate forms, style and expressions for its enrichment” ... Being recognized in the Constitution, however, has had significant relevance for a language's status and functions. it also has an official status in several Indian states. In Nepal, Urdu is a registered regional dialect.

The Urdu language has been described as a Persianised register of the Hindustani language; Urdu and Hindi share a common Sanskrit- and Prakrit-derived vocabulary base, phonology, syntax, and grammar, making them mutually intelligible during colloquial communication. While formal Urdu draws literary, political, and technical vocabulary from Persian, formal Hindi draws these aspects from Sanskrit; consequently, the two languages' mutual intelligibility effectively decreases as the factor of formality increases.

In 1837, the British East India Company chose Urdu as the language to replace Persian across northern India during Company rule; Persian had until this point served as the court language of various Indo-Islamic empires. Religious, social, and political factors arose during the European colonial period that advocated a distinction between Urdu and Hindi, leading to the Hindi–Urdu controversy. Urdu became a literary language in the 18th century and two similar standard forms came into existence in Delhi and Lucknow. Since the partition of India in 1947, a third standard has arisen in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Deccani, an older form used in Deccan, became a court language of the Deccan sultanates by the 16th century.

According to 2018 estimates by Ethnologue, Urdu is the 10th-most widely spoken language in the world, with 230 million total speakers, including those who speak it as a second language.

Etymology

The name ''Urdu'' was first used by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780 for Hindustani language even though he himself also used Hindavi term in his poetry to define the language. ''Ordu'' means army in the Turkic languages. In late 18th century, it was known as ''Zaban-e-Urdu ay'' ''Mualla'' ''زبانِ'' ''اردو'' ''اے'' ''معلّی'' means ''language of the exalted camp''. Earlier it was known as Hindvi, Hindi and Hindustani.

History

Urdu, like Hindi, is a form of Hindustani. Some linguists have suggested that the earliest forms of Urdu evolved from the medieval (6th to 13th century) Apabhraṃśa register of the preceding Shauraseni language, a Middle Indo-Aryan language that is also the ancestor of other modern Indo-Aryan languages.

Origins

In the Delhi region of India the native language was Khariboli, whose earliest form is known as Old Hindi (or Hindavi). It belongs to the Western Hindi group of the Central Indo-Aryan languages. The contact of Hindu and Muslim cultures during the period of Islamic conquests in the Indian subcontinent (12th to 16th centuries) led to the development of Hindustani as a product of a composite Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb.

In cities such as Delhi, the Indian language Old Hindi began to acquire many Persian loanwords and continued to be called "Hindi" and later, also "Hindustani". An early literary tradition of Hindavi was founded by Amir Khusrau in the late 13th century. After the conquest of the Deccan, and a subsequent immigration of noble Muslim families into the south, a form of the language flourished in medieval India as a vehicle of poetry, (especially under the Bahmanids), and is known as Dakhini, which contains loanwords from Telugu and Marathi.

From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century the language now known as Urdu was called ''Hindi'', ''Hindavi'', ''Hindustani'', ''Dehlavi'', ''Lahori'', and ''Lashkari''. The Delhi Sultanate established Persian as its official language in India, a policy continued by the Mughal Empire, which extended over most of northern South Asia from the 16th to 18th centuries and cemented Persian influence on Hindustani.

According to the Tashih Gharaib-ul-Lughat by Khan-i Arzu, the "Zaban-e Urdu-e Shahi" anguage of the Imperial Camphad attained special importance in the time of Alamgir". By the end of the reign of Aurangzeb in the early 1700s, the common language around Delhi began to be referred to as ''Zaban-e-Urdu'', a name derived from the Turkic