History of Urdu

The jury is still out on the actual origin of the Urdu language. However, several theories abound.

The word Urdu is derived from the Turkic word ordu (army), from which English horde is also derived and was therefore thought to have a military origin. However, Turkic borrowings in Urdu are minimal.

The earliest linguistic influences in the development of Urdu probably began with the Arab conquest of Sindh in 711. The language started evolving from Persian and Arabic contacts during subsequent invasions of the Indian subcontinent by Persian and Turkic forces from the 11th century onward.

Urdu developed more decisively during the Delhi Sultanate (1206-1526CE) and the Mughal Empire (1526-1858CE) where it ultimately replaced Persian for court usage.

Urdu vocabulary is composed of about 30% Arabic and 22% Persian loanwords. The rest are borrowings from Sanskrit and other languages.

There are over 200 million native and between 500-600 million second language Urdu speakers. It ranks 19th among the approx. 6,900 languages spoken in the world. According to the 2016 census, there are 69,131 Urdu speakers in Australia and ranks 16 out of 93 languages spoken at home here.

The closest relation of Urdu is Hindi. Spoken Urdu and Hindi are almost identical at the day-to-day functional level. However, Urdu is written right-to-left in the Nastaliq script whereas Hindi is written left-to-right in the Devanagari script.