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Urdu from a linguistic perspective

Urdu: An Essential Grammar, authored by Ruth Laila Schmidt and published by Routledge in 2005, states:

Urdu is a major language of South Asia which has been gaining in popularity since the advent of independence of India and Pakistan. It is one of the eighteen languages listed in the Constitution of India, as well as the national language of Pakistan. Unlike Arabic and Persian, Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language akin to Hindi. Both Urdu and Hindi share the same Indic base, and at the phonological and grammatical level they are so close that they appear to be one language, but at the lexical level they have borrowed so extensively from different sources (Urdu from Arabic and Persian), and Hindi from Sanskrit) that in actual practice and usage each have developed into an independent language. This distinction is further marked at the orthographic level, where Hindi uses Devanagari and Urdu uses the Arabo-Persian script indigenously modified to suit the requirements of an Indo-Aryan speech.

Colloquial Urdu, authored by Tej K Bhatia & Ashok Koul, and published by Routledge in 2005 states:

Urdu is one of the principal modern languages of South Asia. It is spoken by millions of people throughout North India and Pakistan and is also widely understood in the rest of the Indian subcontinent.

Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore, authored by Mary Ellis Gibson and published by Ohio University Press in 2011, states:

Bayly's description of Hindustani (roughly Hindi/Urdu) is helpful here; he uses the term Urdu to represent "the more refined and Persianised form of the common north Indian language Hindustani" (Empire and Information, 193); Bayly more or less follows the late eighteenth-century scholar Sirajuddin Ali Arzu, who proposed a typology of language that ran from "pure Sanskrit, through popular and regional variations of Hindustani to Urdu, which incorporated many loan words from Persian and Arabic. His emphasis on the unity of languages reflected the view of the Sanskrit grammarians and also affirmed the linguistic unity of the north Indian ecumene. What emerged was a kind of register of language types which were appropriate to different conditions. ...But the abiding impression is of linguistic plurality running through the whole society and an easier adaptation to circumstances in both spoken and written speech" (193). The more Persianized the language, the more likely it was to be written in Arabic script; the more Sanskritized the language; the more likely it was to be written in Devanagari.

The introduction of the article on Urdu in the current edition of Encyclopedia Britannica states:

Urdu language, member of the Indo-Aryan group within the Indo-European family of languages. Urdu is spoken as a first language by nearly 70 million people and as a second language by more than 100 million people, predominantly in Pakistan and India. It is the official state language of Pakistan and is also officially recognized, or “scheduled,” in the constitution of India. Significant speech communities exist in the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States as well. Notably, Urdu and Hindi are mutually intelligible.

The introduction of the article on the Hindustani language in the current edition of Encyclopedia Britannica states:

Hindustani language, lingua franca of northern India and Pakistan. Two variants of Hindustani, Urdu and Hindi, are official languages in Pakistan and India, respectively.

Urdu Through Hindi: Nastaliq With the Help of Devanagari, authored by Afroz Taj and published by Rangmahal Press in 1997, states:

Then, about seven centuries ago, the dialects of Hindi spoken in the region of Delhi began to undergo a linguistic change. In the villages, these dialects continued to be spoken much as they had been for centuries. But around Delhi and other urban areas, under the influence of the Persian-speaking Sultans and their military administration, a new dialect began to emerge which would be called Urdu. While Urdu retained the fundamental grammar and basic vocabulary of its Hindi parent dialects, it adopted the Persian writing system, "Nastaliq" and many additional Persian vocabulary words. Indeed, the great poet Amir Khusro (1253-1325) contributed to the early development of Urdu by writing poems with alternating lines of Persian and Hindi dialect written in Persian script. What began humbly as a hodge-podge language spoken by the Indian recruits in the camps of the Sultan's army, by the Eighteenth Century had developed into a sophisticated, poetic language. It is important to note that over the centuries, Urdu continued to develop side by side with the original Hindi dialects, and many poets have written comfortably in both. Thus the distinction between Hindi and Urdu was chiefly a question of style. A poet could draw upon Urdu's lexical richness to create an aura of elegant sophistication, or could use the simple rustic vocabulary of dialect Hindi to evoke the folk life of the village. Somewhere in the middle lay the day to day language spoken by the great majority of people. This day to day language was often referred to by the all-encompassing term "Hindustani."

The Rhetoric of Hindutva, authored by Manisha Basu and published by Cambridge University Press in 2017, states:

Urdu, like Hindi, was a standardized register of the Hindustani language deriving from the Dehlavi dialect and emerged in the eighteenth century under the rule of the late Mughals.

Colloquial Urdu, authored by Tej K Bhatia & Ashok Koul, and published by Routledge in 2005 states:

Urdu is a modern Indo-Aryan language spoken in South Asian countries (India and Pakistan) and also in other countries outside Asia (Mauritius, Trinidad, Fiji, Surinam, Guyana, and South Africa among others). Approximately 600 million people speak Urdu as either a first or a second language and it is ranked amongst the five most widely spoken languages of the world. Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and is spoken widely in cities such as Islamabad and Karachi. It is one of the sixteen regional languages recognized by the constitution of India and is the state language of Jammu and Kashmir. It is widely spoken in the Indian states of Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan and Bihar. Besides, there are millions of Urdu speakers who live in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Urdu is a Turkish loan word meaning 'army' or 'camp'. It was nursed in the camps and capitals of the Muslim rulers in India. Since Delhi was its first major centre of development, it is also called Zaban-e-Dehlvi 'The Language of Delhi'. Another term of this language is Urdu-e-mu'alla 'The Exalted Camp'. Historically, it was synonymous with Hindui, Hindawi, Rexta and Khari Boli. The terms Hindi and Hindustani are also employed to refer to a variety of this language. All these labels denote a mixed speech spoken around the area of Delhi, North India, which gained currency during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as a contact language between native resident s and the Arabs, Afghans, Persians and Turks. Urdu is written in a modified form of the Arabic script.

Hindi Christian Literature in Contemporary India, authored by Rakesh Peter-Dass and published by Routledge in 2019, states:

Two forms of the same language, Nagarai Hindi and Persianized Hindi (Urdu) had identical grammar, shared common words and roots, and employed different scripts.

The Culture of India, authored by Kathleen Kuiper and published by Rosen Publishing in 2010 states:

Urdu is closely related to Hindi, a language that originated and developed in the Indian subcontinent. They share the same Indic base and are so similar in phonology and grammar that they appear to be one language.

Education, Ethnicity and Equity in the Multilingual Asian Context, authored by Jan Gube & Fang Gao and published by Springer Publishing in 2019, states:

The national language of India and Pakistan 'Standard Urdu' is mutually intelligible with 'Standard Hindi' because both languages share the same Indic base and are all but indistinguishable in phonology and grammar (Lust et al. 2000).

Error analysis of the Urdu verb markers, authored by Sharmin Muzaffar & Pitambar Behera and published in the Aligarh Journal of Linguistics in 2014, states:

Modern Standard Urdu, a register of the Hindustani language, is the national language, lingua-franca and is one of the two official languages along with English in Pakistan and is spoken in all over the world. It is also one of the 22 scheduled languages and officially recognized languages in the Constitution of India and has been conferred status of the official language in many Indian states of Bihar, Telangana, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and New Delhi. Urdu is one of the members of the new or modern Indo-Aryan language group within the Indo-European family of languages. There are approximately 70 million native speakers of Urdu: the number of population amounted to 52 million in India as accordingly reported by the 2001 census; around 6% of the population; approximately 10 million in Pakistan or 7.57% according to the 1998 census; and several hundred thousand in the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, United States, and Bangladesh.

English transference of Hindustani: A pragmatic-stylistic study of Gulzar's poetry, authored by Pallavi Kiran and published in the Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities in 2018, states:

“Hindustani, historically also known as Hindavi, Dehlvi and Rekhta, is the lingua franca of North India and Pakistan. It is an Indo-Aryan language, deriving primarily from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi, and incorporates a large amount of vocabulary from Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and Chagatai. It is a pluricentric language, with two official forms, Modern Standard Hindi and Modern Standard Urdu which are its standardised registers, and which may be called Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu when taken together.” (Chand, 1944)

Adapting Predicate Frames for Urdu PropBanking, authored by Riyaz Ahmad Bhat, Naman Jain, Dipti Misra Sharma, Ashwini Vaidya, Martha Palmer, James Babani & Tafseer Ahmed and published through the DHA Suffa University, the University of Colorado and the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad in 2014, states:

Hindi and Urdu are two standardized registers of what has been called the Hindustani language, which belongs to the IndoAryan language family. Although, both the varieties share a common grammar, they differ significantly in their vocabulary to an extent where both become mutually incomprehensible (Masica, 1993). Hindi draws its vocabulary from Sanskrit while Urdu draws its vocabulary from Persian, Arabic and even Turkish.

The Geographical Cradle of Urdu, authored by Jai Pal Singh & Mumtaz Khan and published in the Annals of NAGI in 2016, states:

Urdu originated in India. It is a modern Indo-Aryan language similar to Hindi (Narang, 2007: 1; Dutt et al. 1985). In fact, at the colloquial level, Hindi and Urdu are one language divided by script. Moreover, phonologically and grammatically also they have close affinity and appear to be one language. However, on the lexical level Urdu borrows words from Persian and Arabic whereas Hindi from Sanskrit (Narang, 2007: 1). At the time of Ghurian invasion of Delhi Khariboli was spoken in and around Delhi. At that time, as per the evidence of Vibudh Shridhar, an Apabhramsha writer, it was a flourishing language of Delhi. Faruqi aptly emphasised: “...the dialect now called khariboli, the developed form of which is Urdu, had existed prior to Muslims.

Poems from Iqbal: Renderings in English Verse with Comparative Urdu Text, authored by V.G. Kiernan and published by Oxford University Press in 2013, states:

The written language of the Panjab, and the spoken as well as written language of some other (chiefly Muslim) regions, was Urdu: a blending brought about since medieval times by contact between Hindu India and Persian-speaking invaders and settlers. In basic syntax and vocabulary it is identical with Hindi, but its script is Arabic instead of Sanscrit, and its learned vocabulary Persian and Arabic instead of Sanscrit.

Script Directionality Affects Nonlinguistic Performance: Evidence From Hindi and Urdu, authored by Jyotsna Vaid and published in Scripts and Literacy in 1995, states:

Urdu emerged as the language of contact between Hindu inhabitants and Muslim invaders to India in the 11th century.

Though much of what is said here is common knowledge to those familiar with the history of Urdu, I have added these sources here should anyone find them helpful to reference in the near future. I hope this helps. With regards, Anupam^Talk 21:47, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

Comments

• Comment As usual, helpfulness will be increased if the linguistic perspective is actually based on linguistic sources, and if we commit ourselves to sticking to the latter. There is no lack of good linguistic overview literature. Non-specialized sources which only give background information about Hindi-Urdu are of little value and give no less the impression of WP:CHERRYPICKING as Fowler&fowler's approach. Come on, the last quote starts with "The national language of India...", what are we to do with such a source in this context (no doubts implied about its eventual merits regarding its main topic, which is NB not language/linguistics)? –Austronesier (talk) 09:39, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your input User:Austronesier. I provided many of these sources as they are printed by academic presses and neutrally present introductory information about Urdu. I appreciate your efforts to compromise and help form consensus above and hope that we can continue working on that soon. Kind regards, Anupam^Talk 01:42, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

@Anupam: Ok, let me be more concrete: I am very specifically asking not to use the last three sources, plus Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore and The Rhetoric of Hindutva, since they touch upon the topic of this page only as background information. They may be useful in a WP:COMMONNAME discussion (and certainly as source about their respective primary topic), but not as source for building content here, including lede defintions. Obviously, none of these authors' primary intention was to speak as an authority of Urdu.

This is most obvious with Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore, where the author reproduces information from another source, e.g. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 by Christopher Bayly (Cambridge University Press, 1996), NB again not a source that primarily covers Urdu.

And at least in the case of the last source (Gube & Gao), the factual error about India having a "national language" bitterly illustrates why we should not rely on everything that falls into our hands that happens to mention the term "Urdu". This doesn't do justice to real sources about Urdu, such as e.g. the Routledge volumes by Schmidt and Bhatia & Koul in your list. Your insistence on using random sources is very uncompromising. –Austronesier (talk) 13:27, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

User:Austronesier, I've actually never insisted that these sources be used. Rather, I've listed several references, published by academic presses, journals and encyclopedias, that provide a definition of Urdu. I'm glad you appreciate some of them at least. You're also welcome to do some research yourself and bring to the table what you think might be helpful. I will continue to add to this list what I believe will be beneficial so that when we address the lede in December, we will have plenty of good sources to draw from. Thanks, Anupam^Talk 15:00, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

@Anupam: This is not a matter of taste or appreciation. WP:CONTEXTMATTERS is a guideline to a WP policy. Information provided in passing by an otherwise reliable source that is not related to the principal topics of the publication may not be reliable; editors should cite sources focused on the topic at hand where possible. How can we proceed to a consensus, when the consensus sine qua non (=adhering to WP policies) turns into some kind of optional thing? –Austronesier (talk) 16:04, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

User:Austronesier, since your last comment to me, I spent my valuable time and added additional sources to this section. Instead of showing appreciation for that, you spent your time resorting to making veiled assumptions about my sincerity and further criticizing my work. If you don't want to help bring sources to this article yourself and be respectful to me, then why are you here? If you'd like to participate here, please be collaborative and not overcritical, especially when I actually am trying to show respect for your perspective by taking my time to do additional research and find the kinds of sources you prefer (though I have no obligation to do so). Note that in the section above, it was me that listened to what other editors had to say and suggested new edits in light of them. Please be careful with your future comments. Thanks, Anupam^Talk 17:08, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

I don't think it is overcritical when I observe that 1. "Urdu from a linguistic perspective" is a misnomer as long as it cites non-linguistic sources; 2. non-specialist sources are given the same weight as specialist sources, which is simply undue. Shall I say, I appreciate the effort? When its randomish result will put the burden of finding out what can be taken from it for building quality content on our fellow editors who undertake the laudable effort to actually read their way through this textwall (I mean not your list, or Fowler&fowler epic construction site, but all of this current discussion)?

Again, this has nothing to do with a personal preference. An article about Peru benefits from sources about Peru, or in a wider perspective, from sources about the geography, history etc. of Latin America, but not exactly from citing sources about let's say goat herding, even if they contain a chapter about "Goat Herding in Peru" including a nutshell portrait of Peru (exchange ad lib with "Quantum physics"~"Telecommunication", "Arnold Schoenberg~Sydney Opera House etc). Please respect my concern for source quality, too. And FWIW, I happened to cite a small sample of pretty much non-off-topic sources at an earlier stage of this discussion. Simple decent stuff, just add Bhatia & Koul and Tariq Rahman (From Hindi to Urdu: Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, a symbol of Muslim identity in (north) India and a widely spoken language in the South Asian diaspora spread all over the world. In its spoken form it is so similar to spoken Hindi that, in fact, it has far more second-language users than the numbers of its mother-tongue speakers would suggest.), and we would have a wonderfully simple and broad starting ground, without resorting to random finds. –Austronesier (talk) 18:22, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

• Comment I can appreciate the diversity of citations shared by Anupam. I think that the Britannica articles on Urdu and Hindustani in particular are beneficial and provide a good model of what we should include in the lead. Much of what is found there is also seen in the current version. LearnIndology (talk) 21:07, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

Thanks User:LearnIndology! I agree that they will be good models on which we can base the lede on here when we rewrite it later this year. Your continued participation is welcome. Kind regards, Anupam^Talk 03:13, 27 September 2020 (UTC)

• Comment The Britannica pages on Urdu and Hindustani are not written by scholars but general-purpose editors who do this sort of editing across a wide range of articles. For example, the Britannica article on Urdu is written by an editor who generally works on North African and Middle-East topics. Although I once attempted to use them for another WP page, these articles without bylines are not reliable for citing on Wikipedia, only those with the bylines of scholars are. And there I'm willing to make an exception about third-party sources as Britannica has sufficient oversight; what emerges in its scholarly articles is effectively third-party. I will add some names from Britannica to my list in the section above. Fowler&fowler«Talk» 17:51, 27 September 2020 (UTC)