Urdu اُردو
Spoken in:	Pakistan, India, Fiji. Also spoken as minority language in: USA, UK, Germany, Canada, Australia, France, Italy, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, New Zealand, Afghanistan, Norway, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Mauritius, Bangladesh, Malaysia.
Region:	South Asia, Middle East, Central Asia
Total speakers:	60 million (first language)
Ranking:	19
Language family:	Indo-European  Indo-Iranian   Indo-Aryan    Central zone     Western Hindi      Khariboli       Urdu
Writing system:	Urdu alphabet (Nasta'liq script)
Official status
Official language of:	Pakistan India (five states)
Regulated by:	National Language Authority (Pakistan) National Council for Promotion of Urdu language (India)
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	ur
ISO 639-2:	urd
ISO 639-3:	urd
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-​based pronunciation key.

Urdu (Nasta'liq: اردو) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in South Asia. It is the national and one of the two official languages of Pakistan. Spoken in five Indian states, it is also one of the 22 official languages of India. Its vocabulary is composed from Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Sanskrit.

On the 'NetEdit

July's cover story in Spider magazine (the Dawn Group's Internet Magazine) is titled Sifting Scripts: Is Urdu ready for the information superhighway?.

Highlights of the whole edition, including the full articles on Urdu on the 'Net are available off the Spider web page at: http://www.spider.tm

Top Story provides a good assessement of the state of Urdu on the 'Net--and a critique of what has been going wrong so far. Another story critiques Microsoft's recent launch of an Urdu version of MS Word. Another stories covers how the blogosphere is evolving (http://www.spider.tm/jul2005/cstory2.html)