page_title: Urdu
section_title: Vowels
hierarchical_section_title: Urdu / Phonology / Vowels
context_page_description: Urdu – also known as Lashkari – or Modern Standard Urdu is often described as a Persianised standard register of the Hindustani language. Urdu is the official national language, and lingua franca, of Pakistan. In India, it is one of 22 constitutionally recognised official languages, having official status in the five states of Bihar, Jharkhand, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, as well as the national capital territory of Delhi.
  As both registers are composed of the same Indo-Aryan vocabulary base, colloquial Urdu is largely mutually intelligible with colloquial Hindi, with the two registers being grouped together as Hindustani or Hindi-Urdu. With respect to literary vocabulary, however, formal Urdu draws heavily from Persian vocabulary and requires knowledge of some simple Persian grammatical structures, while formal Hindi heavily draws from Sanskrit for its formal and technical vocabulary.
  Urdu became the official language of government in northern and northwest India, along with English, from 1837 onwards in place of Persian, which had been used by various Indo-Islamic empires as their language of government.
context_section_description: Note
  Marginal and non-universal vowels are in parentheses.
caption: The oral vowel phonemes of Urdu according to Ohala (1999:102) harvcoltxt error: no target: CITEREFOhala1999 (help)