Welcome to the Urdu Wikibook, a free textbook for learning Urdu! Urdu is one of the two official languages of Pakistan and official in India. It is also one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of five Indian states. There are between 60 and 80 million native speakers of standard Urdu. According to the SIL Ethnologue (2019 data), Urdu is the twentieth most spoken language in the world. Urdu first developed in and around Delhi after the Muslim conquests of India in the 13th Century AD. It is written in an adapted form of the Arabic script and has acquired a large part of its vocabulary from Persian, which for long time remained the language of the royal courts. Linguistically, it belongs to the Indo-European family and is thus related to English and many other European languages. Grammatically, Urdu is identical to Hindi and at the spoken level they are mutually intelligible.
To read more about the history of Urdu: History
