Modern Standard Hindi, commonly referred to as Hindi, is the standardised variety of the Hindustani language written in Devanagari script. It is the official language of India alongside English and the lingua franca of North India. Hindi is considered a Sanskritised register of the Hindustani language, which itself is based primarily on the Khariboli dialect of Delhi and neighbouring areas. It is an official language in nine states and three union territories and an additional official language in three other states. Hindi is also one of the 22 scheduled languages of the Republic of India.
Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, where it is also an official language alongside English. In India, Urdu is an Eighth Schedule language, the status and cultural heritage of which are recognised by the Constitution of India; and it also has an official status in several Indian states. In Nepal, Urdu is a registered regional dialect and in South Africa, it is a protected language in the constitution. It is also spoken as a minority language in Afghanistan and Bangladesh, with no official status.
Hindustani is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in North India and Pakistan, and functioning as the lingua franca of the region. It is also spoken by the Deccani people. Hindustani is a pluricentric language with two standard registers, known as Hindi and Urdu which serve as official languages of India and Pakistan, respectively. Thus, it is also called Hindi–Urdu. Colloquial registers of the language fall on a spectrum between these standards. In modern times, a third variety of Hindustani with significant English influences has also appeared which is sometimes called Hinglish or Urdish.
Pakistan is a multilingual country with over 70 languages spoken as first languages. The majority of Pakistan's languages belong to the Indo-Iranian group of the Indo-European language family.
Sindhi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by about 30 million people in the Pakistani province of Sindh, where it has official status. It is also spoken by a further 1.7 million people in India, where it is a scheduled language, without any state-level official status. The main writing system is the Perso-Arabic script, which accounts for the majority of the Sindhi literature and is the only one currently used in Pakistan. In India, both the Perso-Arabic script and Devanagari are used.
Marwari is a language within the Rajasthani language family of the Indo-Aryan languages. Marwari and its closely related varieties like Dhundhari, Shekhawati and Mewari form a part of the broader Marwari language family. It is spoken in the Indian state of Rajasthan, as well as the neighbouring states of Gujarat and Haryana, some adjacent areas in eastern parts of Pakistan, and some migrant communities in Nepal. There are two dozen varieties of Marwari.
Urdu poetry is a tradition of poetry and has many different forms. Today, it is an important part of the culture of India and Pakistan. According to Naseer Turabi, there are five major poets of Urdu: Mir Taqi Mir, Mirza Ghalib, Mir Anees, Muhammad Iqbal and Josh Malihabadi. The language of Urdu reached its pinnacle under the British Raj, and it received official status. All famous writers of Urdu language including Ghalib and Iqbal were given British scholarships. Following the Partition of India in 1947, it found major poets and scholars were divided along the nationalistic lines. However, Urdu poetry is cherished in both the nations. Both the Muslims and Hindus from across the border continue the tradition.
Balti is a Tibetic language natively spoken by the ethnic Balti people in the Baltistan region of Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, Nubra Valley of the Leh district and in the Kargil district of Ladakh, India. The language differs from Standard Tibetan; many sounds of Old Tibetan that were lost in Standard Tibetan are retained in the Balti language. It also has a simple pitch accent system only in multi-syllabic words while Standard Tibetan has a complex and distinct pitch system that includes tone contour. Due to effects of dominant languages in Pakistani media like Urdu, Punjabi and English and religious impact of Arabic and Persian languages, Balti, like other regional languages of Pakistan, is continuously expanding its vocabulary base with loanwords.
Nastaliq, also romanized as Nastaʿlīq or Nastaleeq, is one of the main calligraphic hands used to write the Perso-Arabic script and it is used for some Indo-Iranian languages, predominantly Classical Persian, Kashmiri, Punjabi (Shahmukhi) and Urdu. It is often used also for Ottoman Turkish poetry, but rarely for Arabic. Nastaliq developed in Iran from naskh beginning in the 13th century and remains widely used in Iran, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other countries for written poetry and as a form of art.
Hindustani is one of the predominant languages of South Asia, with federal status in the republics of India and Pakistan in its standardized forms of Hindi and Urdu respectively. It is widely spoken and understood as a second language in Nepal, Bangladesh, and the Persian Gulf and as such is considered a lingua franca in the northern Indian subcontinent. It is also one of the most widely spoken languages in the world by total number of speakers. It developed in north India, principally during the Mughal Empire, when the Persian language exerted a strong influence on the Western Hindi languages of central India; this contact between the Hindu and Muslim cultures resulted in the core Indo-Aryan vocabulary of the Indian dialect of Hindi spoken in Delhi, whose earliest form is known as Old Hindi, being enriched with Persian loanwords. Rekhta, or "mixed" speech, which came to be known as Hindustani, Hindi, Hindavi, and Urdu, also locally known as Lashkari or Lashkari Zaban in long form, was thus created. This form was elevated to the status of a literary language, and after the partition of colonial India and independence this collection of dialects became the basis for modern standard Hindi and Urdu. Although these official languages are distinct registers with regards to their formal aspects, such as modern technical vocabulary, they continue to be all but indistinguishable in their vernacular form. From the colonial era onwards, Hindustani has also taken in many words from English, with an urban English-influenced variety emerging known as Hinglish.
The Hindi–Urdu controversy arose in 19th century colonial India out of the debate over whether Modern Standard Hindi or Standard Urdu should be chosen as a national language.
The Hindi Wikipedia is Modern Standard Hindi edition of Wikipedia. It was launched in July 2003. As of October 2024, it has 163,376 articles, and ranks 10th in terms of depth among Wikipedias.
The Urdu alphabet is the right-to-left alphabet used for writing Urdu. It is a modification of the Persian alphabet, which itself is derived from the Arabic script. It has co-official status in the republics of Pakistan, India and South Africa. The Urdu alphabet has up to 39 or 40 distinct letters with no distinct letter cases and is typically written in the calligraphic Nastaʿlīq script, whereas Arabic is more commonly written in the Naskh style.
Persian calligraphy or Iranian calligraphy is the calligraphy of the Persian language. It is one of the most revered arts throughout the history of Iran.
The Urdu keyboard is any keyboard layout for Urdu computer and typewriter keyboards. Since the first Urdu typewriter was made available in 1911, the layout has gone through various phases of evolution. With time, the variety of layouts introduced in the 1950s for mechanized compositions have reduced to very few that are compatible with the new digital age. Modern improvements in Urdu keyboard were pioneered by the National Language Authority in Pakistan, which standardized the linguistic aspects such as orthography and lexicography. These developments helped the keyboard layout to evolve from the typewriters to be compatible with computers, to increase the productivity and textual efficiency of the language, especially through modern electronic media.
Droid is a font family first released in 2007 and created by Ascender Corporation for use by the Open Handset Alliance platform Android and licensed under the Apache License. The fonts are intended for use on the small screens of mobile handsets and were designed by Steve Matteson of Ascender Corporation.
InPage is a word processor and page layout software by Concept Software Pvt. Ltd., an Indian information technology company. It is used for languages such as Urdu, Arabic, Balti, Balochi, Burushaski, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Sindhi and Shina under Windows and macOS. It was first developed in 1994 and is primarily used for creating pages in Urdu, using the Nasta`līq (نستعلیق) style of Arabic script.
The Sindhi Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia, started 6 February 2006. It is the Sindhi language edition of Wikipedia, a free, open-content encyclopedia. It has 18,290 articles. Since 2014, the encyclopedia has experienced an overall increase in content.
Modern Standard Hindi is mutually intelligible with Urdu, the national and official language of Pakistan. Both are standard registers of the Hindustani language. As a result of linguistic and cultural similarities, Hindi has had notable influences in Pakistan and is taught as an academic subject in some institutions; before the partition of colonial India, Hindi was taught at major universities in the provinces that came to form Pakistan. While Hindi and Urdu both have a predominantly Indic (Indo-Aryan) base, Hindi uses more Sanskrit words in its educated vocabulary while Urdu incorporates more Arabic, Persian, and a few Turkic words for the same. Most poetry, ghazals, qawalis & lyrics use many Urdu words.
Hindi–Urdu is the lingua franca of modern-day Northern India and Pakistan. Modern Standard Hindi is officially registered in India as a standard written using the Devanagari script, and Standard Urdu is officially registered in Pakistan as a standard written using an extended Perso-Arabic script.
