The Persian language and Urdu have had an intricate relationship throughout the history of the latter. Persian historically played a significant role in the formation and development of the modern Urdu, and today acts as its prestige language.
Modern Persian was brought to the South Asia by rulers of Turko-Persian origin from Central Asia during the region's medieval period. The large effect of Persian on Urdu is due to its historical status as an official and literary language under many of these rulers, as well as its status as a lingua franca during their reign over the subcontinent.
Hindustani (sometimes called Hindi–Urdu) is a colloquial language and lingua franca of Pakistan and the Hindi Belt of India. It forms a dialect continuum between its two formal registers: the highly Persianized Urdu, and the de-Persianized, Sanskritized Hindi.[2] Urdu uses a modification of the Persian alphabet, whereas Hindi uses Devanagari. Hindustani in its common form is often referred to as Urdu or Hindi, depending on the background of the speaker/institution. This situation is fraught with sociopolitical factors and controversies, in which Persian plays a part.[3] The common linguistic position is to use Urdu as the term for the register, and Hindustani for the spoken, common language.
Hindustani bears significant influence from Persian; in its common form, it already incorporates many long-assimilated words and phrases from Persian, which it shares with speakers across national borders. As the register Urdu, it bears the most Persian influence of any variety in the subcontinent, featuring further vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation influences.[3] The latter form of the language is associated with formal contexts and prestige, and is deployed as the medium of written communication, education, and media in Pakistan. This happens in more restricted settings in India, where the Sanskritised register of Hindi is more widely used for these purposes; Urdu appears in the social contexts and institutions associated with Indian Muslims, as well as in literary circles.[4] It is one of India's 22 scheduled languages, and is given official status in multiple Indian states.
However, the majority of influence from Persian is direct, through a process often called Persianization. Following the Turko-Persian conquest of South Asia by the Ghaznavids, Persian was introduced into the Indian subcontinent. The Delhi dialect of Old Hindi and other dialects of South Asia received a large influx of Persian, Chagatai and Arabic vocabulary.[5] The subsequent Delhi Sultanate gave way for a further continuation of this. The basis in general for the introduction of the Persian language into the subcontinent was set, from its earliest days, by Afghan and various Persianate dynasties from Central Asia of Turkic origin.[6]
This lexically diverse register of language, which emerged in the northern Indian subcontinent, was commonly called Zaban-e Urdu-e Mualla ('language of the orda - court').
Unlike Persian, which is an Iranian language, Urdu is an Indo-Aryan language, written in the Perso-Arabic script; Urdu has a Indic vocabulary base derived from Sanskrit and Prakrit, with specialized vocabulary being borrowed from Persian.[7][8][9][10] Some grammatical elements peculiar to Persian, such as the enclitic ezāfe and the use of pen-names, were readily absorbed into Urdu literature both in the religious and secular spheres.[11]
Hindustani gained distinction in literary and cultural spheres in South Asia because of its role as a lingua franca in the Indian subcontinent as a result of the large number of speakers the language has, both as a first and second language.[12] A prominent crossover writer was Amir Khusrau, an Indian poet whose Persian and Urdu couplets are to this day read in South Asia. Muhammad Iqbal, the national poet of Pakistan, was also a prominent South Asian writer who wrote in both Persian and Urdu; which in later life he reverted back to Persian exclusively.
همهی افراد بشر آزاد به دنیا میآیند و حیثیت و حقوقشان با هم برابر است، همه اندیشه و وجدان دارند و باید در برابر یکدیگر با روح برادری رفتار کنند.
Transliteration
Hame-ye afrād-e bashar āzād be donyā mi āyand o heysiyat o hoquq-e shān bā ham barābar ast, hame andishe o vejdān dārand o bāyad dar barābare yekdigar bā ruh-e barādari raftār konand.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
Standard Urdu
دفعہ ١: تمام اِنسان آزاد اور حُقوق و عِزت کے اعتبار سے برابر پَیدا ہُوئے ہَیں۔ انہیں ضمِیر اور عقل ودِیعت ہوئی ہَیں۔ اِس لئے انہیں ایک دُوسرے کے ساتھ بھائی چارے کا سُلُوک کرنا چاہئے۔
Article 1—All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience. Therefore, they should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
^Strnad, Jaroslav (2013). Morphology and Syntax of Old Hindī: Edition and Analysis of One Hundred Kabīr vānī Poems from Rājasthān. Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN978-90-04-25489-3. Quite different group of nouns occurring with the ending -a in the dir. plural consists of words of Arabic or Persian origin borrowed by the Old Hindi with their Persian plural endings.
^Ahmad, Aijaz (2002). Lineages of the Present: Ideology and Politics in Contemporary South Asia. Verso. p. 113. ISBN9781859843581. On this there are far more reliable statistics than those on population. Farhang-e-Asafiya is by general agreement the most reliable Urdu dictionary. It was compiled in the late nineteenth century by an Indian scholar little exposed to British or Orientalist scholarship. The lexicographer in question, Syed Ahmed Dehlavi, had no desire to sunder Urdu's relationship with Farsi, as is evident even from the title of his dictionary. He estimates that roughly 75 per cent of the total stock of 55,000 Urdu words that he compiled in his dictionary are derived from Sanskrit and Prakrit, and that the entire stock of the base words of the language, without exception, are derived from these sources. What distinguishes Urdu from a great many other Indian languauges ... is that it draws almost a quarter of its vocabulary from language communities to the west of India, such as Farsi, Turkish, and Tajik. Most of the little it takes from Arabic has not come directly but through Farsi.
^Dalmia, Vasudha (31 July 2017). Hindu Pasts: Women, Religion, Histories. SUNY Press. p. 310. ISBN9781438468075. On the issue of vocabulary, Ahmad goes on to cite Syed Ahmad Dehlavi as he set about to compile the Farhang-e-Asafiya, an Urdu dictionary, in the late nineteenth century. Syed Ahmad 'had no desire to sunder Urdu's relationship with Farsi, as is evident from the title of his dictionary. He estimates that roughly 75 percent of the total stock of 55.000 Urdu words that he compiled in his dictionary are derived from Sanskrit and Prakrit, and that the entire stock of the base words of the language, without exception, are from these sources' (2000: 112–13). As Ahmad points out, Syed Ahmad, as a member of Delhi's aristocratic elite, had a clear bias towards Persian and Arabic. His estimate of the percentage of Prakitic words in Urdu should therefore be considered more conservative than not. The actual proportion of Prakitic words in everyday language would clearly be much higher.
