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Why Study Urdu?

Dating back to the thirteenth century, Urdu is an Indo-European language closely related to Hindi, from which it is separated primarily by the script used and items of vocabulary. Urdu has been more influenced by Persian and Arabic (because of its role as the lingua franca of the Mughal dynasty), while Hindi has been more influenced by Sanskrit. Together with Persian, Urdu was the literary language of the Mughal court. Classical Urdu literature is particularly rich and extensive. Urdu is the state language of Pakistan. While only about 10 million Pakistanis speak it as their mother tongue, many more speak it as a second language.  In the 1991 Indian census, over 40 million people listed it as their mother tongue, behind only Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, and Tamil. If second language users are included, there are over 100 million Urdu speakers worldwide (in twenty-two countries), including over a million in the US.