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Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in South Asia, with 230 million speakers worldwide. It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, where it is also an official language alongside English, and has a Persianised register and a rich literary heritage.
A list of English words that have been borrowed from Hindi and Urdu, two registers of the Hindustani language. Many words have Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, or Turkic roots, and some entered English during the colonial period.
Urdu Wikipedia is the Standard Urdu-language edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia. It has 207,915 articles, 182,047 registered users and 12,628 files, and it is the 54th largest edition of Wikipedia by article count.
Learn about the history, script and letters of the Urdu alphabet, a modification of the Persian alphabet derived from the Arabic script. See examples of Nastaʿlīq, the dominant style of Urdu calligraphy, and compare it with other abjad scripts.
Learn about the official languages, regional languages, and endangered languages of Pakistan. Urdu is the national language and English is the co-official language, while Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, Saraiki, and Balochi are the major regional languages.
Learn how Persian influenced the formation and development of Urdu, a colloquial language and lingua franca of Pakistan and India. See a sample comparison of Iranian Persian and formal Urdu texts from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Note that Hindi–Urdu transliteration schemes can be used for Punjabi as well, for Gurmukhi (Eastern Punjabi) to Shahmukhi (Western Punjabi) conversion, since Shahmukhi is a superset of the Urdu alphabet (with 2 extra consonants) and the Gurmukhi script can be easily converted to the Devanagari script.
The Urdu Dictionary Board is a Pakistani institution that edits and publishes a comprehensive dictionary of the Urdu language. It was established in 1958 and has faced funding and staffing issues since 2019.