- Official language in
- Pakistan
- Also spoken in
- India
- Script
- Arabic
Where it's spoken
Pakistan's constitution names Urdu as the country's national language, and states that arrangements shall be made for its use for official and other purposes, with the English language usable for official purposes until arrangements are made for its replacement by Urdu. Without prejudice to Urdu's status as the national language, the same article separately lets a Provincial Assembly legislate for the teaching, promotion, and use of a provincial language alongside it.
In India, Urdu is one of the languages included in the constitution's Eighth Schedule — a list the constitution's own text refers to as containing "the other languages of India specified in the Eighth Schedule."
Sources
- Constitution of Pakistan (1973, reinst. 2002, rev. 2015; text as reproduced by the Comparative Constitutions Project) — Article 251 (National language)
- Constitution of India (1949, as amended through 2023; text as reproduced by the Comparative Constitutions Project) — Eighth Schedule (Articles 344(1) and 351); Article 351
Script & pronunciation
This app's Urdu cards are written in the Arabic script. The Unicode Standard describes the Arabic script as having been "extended to represent a number of other languages, such as Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Sindhi, and Uyghur, as well as many African languages," and notes that "Urdu is often written with the ornate Nastaliq script variety." Classical Arabic has only three canonical vowels, but the Unicode Standard notes that "languages such as Urdu and Persian include other contrasting vowels such as /o/ and /e/." When the Perso-Arabic writing system was adapted for Urdu, the letter yeh barree was adopted, in the Unicode Standard's description, "to accommodate the richer vowel repertoire of Urdu": South Asian languages including Urdu use yeh barree for the /e/ vowel, in contrast with the /i/ vowel, usually written with a separate letter called Farsi yeh. This app's card آپ کا نام کیا ہے؟ ("What is your name?") ends in ہے (hai, "is"), written with yeh barree. A separate letter, noon ghunna, is described by the Unicode Standard as marking "nasalized vowels at the ends of words and some morphemes in Urdu, Balochi, and other languages of Southern Asia." This app's card کیا آپ انگریزی بولتے ہیں؟ ("Do you speak English?") ends in ہیں (hain, "are"), written with noon ghunna. Like other scripts covered in the same Unicode chapter, Urdu's Arabic script is written right to left.
Sources
- The Unicode Standard, Version 16.0.0 — Core Specification, Chapter 9: Middle East-I (Arabic) — §9.2.1 Arabic (languages list, Nastaliq, canonical vowels); §9.2.4 Arabic Joining Groups (yeh barree, Farsi yeh, noon ghunna); chapter introduction (right-to-left)
Grammar essentials
In the past tense, Urdu marks the subject of a transitive verb with a separate particle, نے (ne). One academic study of case marking situates Urdu, together with Hindi, as "a morphologically split-ergative language in which the ergative marker is sensitive to perfect morphology" — meaning this marking appears with past/perfective transitive verb forms rather than throughout the language. This app's card آپ نے بہت اچھا کیا ("You did a very good job") illustrates the pattern: its own notes describe آپ نے as "you" plus this ergative particle, and explain that Urdu uses نے with transitive verbs in the past tense.
Urdu also uses postpositions rather than prepositions. The same study, discussing a set of Urdu postpositions with English glosses like "behind," "for," and "with," notes that "all the items ... correspond to a relational preposition in English," but that "in contrast to English, they appear after the NP." This app's card کیا یہاں ریمپ یا سیڑھیوں کے بغیر دروازہ ہے؟ ("Is there a ramp or step-free entrance?") includes the postposition کے بغیر ("without"), whose own note likewise says that Urdu uses postpositions, not prepositions. The genitive particle کا, which links a possessor to what it owns, follows the same pattern: in this app's card آپ کا نام کیا ہے؟ ("What is your name?"), کا follows آپ ("you").
Negation in this app's cards is formed by placing نہیں (nahin) directly before the verb it negates, as in میرا سامان ابھی تک نہیں آیا ("My luggage hasn't arrived"), whose own note explains that the negator نہیں goes immediately before the verb.
Sources
- Butt, Miriam; King, Tracy Holloway (2004). "The Status of Case." In V. Dayal and A. Mahajan (eds.) Clause Structure in South Asian Languages. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 153-198 — p.1 (split-ergativity); p.18 (postpositions, examples 25-26)
Politeness & etiquette
Urdu distinguishes three second-person pronouns, differing in the degree of respect they show. One academic study of the Urdu/Hindi pronoun system notes that its second person "includes some honorific distinctions," and its paradigm table lists three separate second-person forms: tu, tum, and ap. This app's cards default to the most respectful of the three, آپ (aap): its own card for آپ describes it as "the polite second person for strangers" and says it is the only one "a traveller needs." A related card, کیا آپ انگریزی بولتے ہیں؟ ("Do you speak English?"), gives the same guidance in its own note: use آپ with strangers, and reserve تم and تو for close relationships.