Urdu is spoken by over 150 million people in many parts of the South Asian continent. It is the official language of Pakistan and one of the national languages of India. It is also spoken as a first or second language in South Asian diaspora communities in the Middle East, South and East Africa, Western Europe, North America, and Australia.
The relationship between Urdu and Hindi, both sharing the same Indic base, has been described as "intimate and complex". On phonological and grammatical level they are so close that they appear to be one language. On the lexical level however, especially in formal and literary language, the differences are more distinct. Both languages have borrowed extensively from difference sources - Urdu from Arabic and Persian - Hindi from Sanskrit. In practice and usage each has developed into an independent language and marked in orthography: Urdu using the Perso-Arabic script, Hindi using the Devanagari script.
CLASSIFICATION = Indo-Aryan language (within the branch of the Indo-Iranian languages, itself a branch of the Indo-European language family), SCRIPT = Perso-Arabic script
