Urdu became a literary language in the 18th century and two similar standard forms came into existence in Delhi and Lucknow. 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. In 1837, Urdu became an official language of the British East India Company, replacing Persian across northern India during Company rule Persian had until this point served as the court language of various Indo-Islamic empires. 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. Urdu 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. It is also spoken as a minority language in Afghanistan and Bangladesh, with no official status. In Nepal, Urdu is a registered regional dialect and in South Africa it is a protected language in the constitution. In India, Urdu is an Eighth Schedule language whose status and cultural heritage is recognized by the Constitution of India it also has an official status in several Indian states.

It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, where it is also an official language alongside English. Urdu ( Nastaliq: اردو / ˈ ʊər d uː/ ALA-LC: Urdū) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters.

This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Areas where Urdu is neither official nor co-official

Allah 99 names with urdu translation