Irfan Ali Thanvi

Urdu Language Course Outline Irfan Ali Thanvi

The language of the road, and most widely spoken and understood language in Pakistan and India is Urdu (along with her dialectical forms known as Hindustani, Hindi, Bihari, Dakhini). More than 220 million people in the Sub-continent regard it as their mother tongue and as of 2017, Urdu is actively used as a lingua franca by more than 400 million people in India and Pakistan in their daily lives including pleasure and work. Apart from the subcontinent large Urdu speaking communities are found abroad in the USA, UK, Mauritius, South Africa, Yemen, Uganda, Singapore, Nepal, New Zealand, Germany and the Middle East. Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and an official language of State of UP in India. It unites all people and all communities, whatever their mother tongue might be. Urdu has been influenced and enriched by Dravidian, Turkish, Farsi, Arabic, Portuguese and English. It is a very expressive language full of satire, comedy and art. Through her poetry, prose and songs, Urdu has conveyed emotions using simple and gentle words, notwithstanding the uses for exact and rational reasoning. Urdu is graceful and poetic with no over-harsh gutturals to cause a foreigner stumble in his/her pronunciation. It is also a language that lends herself to scholarship and artistic endeavor and that rests on a vast and elegant body of literature and poetry going back some 700 years. Most notably, however, it is a polite and gentle language which, in its forms of speech, recognizes the basic equality of all humanity, bestowing equal respect on the servant and the master, the courtier and the king.