Urdu

Urdu (/ˈʊərduː/; Urdu: (Urdu: اُردُو‎), ) is a register of Hindi-Urdu in South Asia. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also widely spoken in India, where it is one of the 22 scheduled languages and an official language of five states. Based on the Khariboli dialect of Delhi, Urdu developed under the influence of Persian, Arabic, and Turkic languages over the course of almost 900 years. It began to take shape in the region of Uttar Pradesh in the Indian subcontinent during the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1527), and continued to develop under the Mughal Empire (1526–1858). Urdu is mutually intelligible with Standard Hindi spoken in India. Both languages share the same Indo-Aryan base, and are so similar in basic structure, grammar and to large extend vocabulary and phonology, that they appear to be one language. The combined population of Urdu and Standard Hindi speakers is the fourth largest in the world.