Interesting facts about the language

Urdu is spoken as a native language by 60 to 80 million people, depending on estimates. Most native speakers of Urdu do not live in Pakistan, where it is the official language alongside English, but in India, where it is spoken by around 50 million people. In Pakistan, on the other hand, less than 10 percent of the population speaks it as their first language, although the vast majority of Pakistanis also understand Urdu, as it acts as a lingua franca between the many differently speaking sections of the population. After all, more than 50 different languages are spoken there, of which Punjabi is the most widely spoken: almost half of the Pakistani population speaks it as their native language. Larger populations that speak Urdu as their native language can also be found in the Persian Gulf states (e.g. Oman, Saudi Arabia or Qatar), in Bangladesh, South Africa, Canada, the USA and Western Europe. For example, around 400,000 people in Great Britain and around 30,000 in the Federal Republic of Germany speak Urdu as their native language.

Urdu's "twin language" is Hindi. When a Hindi and an Urdu speaker converse in everyday life, they can usually understand each other without much difficulty. The difference between the two languages lies primarily in the borrowings they have made from other languages: Many Hindi words come from Sanskrit. Urdu, on the other hand, uses a large number of words of Persian, Arabic, and Turkish origin. And so the two languages also use completely different writing systems: While Hindi is written using the Devanagari syllabic script, Urdu uses the Arabic-Persian script. Hindi is the Hindu variant of the language, while Urdu is spoken in Indian regions with a high Muslim population. Urdu is written using the Persian alphabet, which is a variant of the Arabic script. It is also important to know that Urdu is written and read from right to left.