Urdu (pronunciation (help·info), اردو, trans. Urdū, historically spelled Ordu) is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Iranian branch. It developed under Persian and to a lesser degree Arabic and Turkic influence on apabhramshas during the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire (1526–1858 AD) in mostly Central Asia and parts of South Asia.

Urdu is a standardised register of the standard dialect Khariboli. The grammatical description in this article concerns this standard Urdū.

Standard Urdu has approximately the twentieth largest population of native speakers, among all languages. It is the national language of Pakistan as well as one of the 23 official languages of India.

Urdu is often contrasted with Hindi, a standardised form of Hindustani. Of the many differences between the two are that Standard Urdu is conventionally written in Nastaliq calligraphy style of the Perso-Arabic script and draws vocabulary from Persian and Arabic, while Standard Hindi is conventionally written in Devanāgarī and draws vocabulary entirely from Sanskrit, Urdu and English heavily. Despite overwhelming evidence, a few linguists nonetheless consider Urdu and Hindi to be two standardized forms of the same language; however, most linguistic scholars classify them separately due to sociolinguistic and basic differences.

There are two good websites where you can learn Urdu:

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