Urdu: The Language of the Exalted Camp Quiz

Answer: Indo-European

Like many of the languages spoken in South Asia, Urdu is a Indo-European language of the Indo-Iranian branch, the largest of the branches that comprise that vast family. The Indo-Iranian branch in turn is divided into three smaller branches, one of which - the Indo-Aryan languages - includes over 200 languages spoken by over a billion people. Most of these languages are spoken in the Indian subcontinent; one of them, Romani, is also spoken in Europe by the peoples formerly referred to as Gypsies.

The other two branches of the modern Indo-Iranian languages are Iranian (which includes Farsi, Pashto and Kurdish) and Nuristani (which includes a number of languages spoken in eastern Afghanistan by about 130,000 people). It is estimated that the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European family numbers about 320 distinct languages.

The Hamito-Semitic family, also known as Afroasiatic, includes Arabic, Hebrew and Amharic (the language spoken in Ethiopia). The Niger-Congo family comprises hundred of languages spoken throughout sub-Saharan Africa. The Sino-Tibetan family, the world's second-largest after the Indo-European, includes most languages spoken in China, as well as Tibetan and Burmese.

Answer: True

Meaning "of Hindustan" (the Persian name of the Indian subcontinent), Hindustani is the name given to the language used as a lingua franca in India and Pakistan, also known as Hindi-Urdu .Hindustani is thought to have developed from various Indo-Aryan dialects spoken in North India, in particular the Khariboli dialect of the region of Delhi, in the early 13th century.

Like English, Chinese and Arabic, Hindustani is considered a pluricentric language - that is, a language with more than one standardized version. The case of Hindi and Urdu is similar to that of Malaysian and Indonesian, or Serbian and Croatian, as the different standards have become autonomous languages, while remaining to a large extent mutually intelligible. The most evident difference between Hindi and Urdu is the script, as Hindi is written in Devanagari, and Urdu in a variant of the Arabic script.

Modern Urdu has a number of recognized dialects. One of them, Dakhni or Deccani, spoken in the Deccan region of southern India, is characterized by the presence of loanwords from other major languages of India - such as Marathi, Konkani and Telugu (a Dravidian language unlike the other two) - as well as vocabulary of Persian, Arabic and Turkic origin that is not found in standard Urdu. In India, Urdu is one of the 22 languages officially recognized by the Eight Schedule to the Constitution.

Answer: Horde

Unlike the language itself, Urdu's name is of relatively recent origin, dating from the Mughal era. In the early 18th century, the language spoken around Delhi began to be referred to as "Zaban-e-Ordu", meaning "language of the exalted (royal) camp". Because of that, some sources report that Urdu was originally used as a lingua franca by the soldiers in the Mughal's army, who came from different parts of Asia. However, the implication that Urdu may be a sort of pidgin rather than a natural language has been rejected by many language experts, especially in Pakistan. Like most other languages (English being a textbook example of this), Urdu has borrowed its share of words of foreign origin, but its basic structure is purely Indo-Aryan. The first appearance of the shortened name Urdu dates from 1780, when the word was used by poet Ghulam Hamdani Mash'hafi.

The word "ordu" in "Zaban-e-Ordu" is of Turkic origin, and originally meant "royal residence or camp" - later coming to denote any military encampment. The English "horde" for a large and possibly threatening group of people has the same origin, though it was borrowed from Russian in reference to the 13th-century Mongol khanate known as "Golden Horde". The three words listed as wrong answers have completely different origins.

Answer: Persian

Persian was the official language of the Muslim dynasties that ruled India from 1210 to 1857 - first the Delhi Sultanate, then the Mughal Empire. It was also the language of poetry, literature and art, while Arabic was the language of religion. These two languages influenced the development of present-day Urdu, particularly in terms of vocabulary: while the vocabulary of Hindi comes for the most part from Sanskrit, the vocabulary of Urdu features a remarkable number of Persian (and, to a lesser extent, Arabic) loanwords, which often tend to pertain to more formal or technical contexts. It has been estimated that about 25%-30% of Urdu's vocabulary comes either directly from Persian, or from Arabic through Persian. The influence of Persian became stronger in Pakistan after the country's independence from India in 1947, as a way to affirm its identity as a Muslim country in contrast with India, and as a symbol of unity.

In present-day Pakistan, Urdu shares official language status with English, from which it has borrowed many words. While "Pinglish" or "Paklish" are the nicknames given to the variety of English spoken in Pakistan, there is also "Urdish" - a hybrid word that refers to the code-switching between Urdu and English that frequently occurs in certain situations or social groups. However, given the identification of Urdu with Islam and its values, Urdu words are nearly always used when expressing Muslim religious concepts.

Answer: Urdu is more common as a second than as a first language

Both Urdu and Hindi share the distinction of being used as the main means of communication in countries noted for their multilingualism. However, only a small percentage of the population of Pakistan (about 7%) speak Urdu as a native language. Most Pakistani Urdu speakers are concentrated in urban areas, especially in the south-eastern region of Sindh - where Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, is located. Among the rest of the population, Urdu is widespread as a second or third language. The country's largest ethnolinguistic group is Punjabi, amounting to about 38% of Pakistan's population. As a whole, according to the specialized reference publication "Ethnologue", in 2023 Urdu had about 230 million speakers - of which 71 million spoke it as a first language. Surprising as it may sound - given Urdu's preeminent status in Pakistan - India is home to a higher number of Urdu speakers.

Hindi vastly outnumbers Urdu in terms of native speakers: it is estimated that over 320 million people worldwide speak it as a first language, while almost as many (270 million according to 2016 data) speak it as a second or third language. In the 2023 edition of "Ethnologue", Hindi appears as the world's third most spoken language (after English and Mandarin Chinese), with over 600 million speakers in total. Urdu occupies the 10th slot of the list.

Answer: South Africa

In Chapter 1 (Founding Provisions) of the current Constitution of South Africa, ratified in 1996, the section about languages (Section 6) states that the Pan South African Language Board must "promote and ensure respect for all languages commonly used by communities in South Africa." Being spoken in older immigrant communities throughout the country, Urdu is one of the 11 languages expressly mentioned in the fifth paragraph of Section 6, as are Hindi, Sanskrit, Gujarati, Tamil, and Telugu - all languages originating in the Indian subcontinent.

Under the Indian indenture service that replaced slavery in the British Empire and other European colonial powers, many Indians were transported to South Africa to work as labourers. Most of them were concentrated in the former colony of Natal: the port city of Durban, the capital of present-day KwaZulu Natal, has the country's highest concentration of people of South Asian descent. Many Urdu speakers arrived in South Africa as traders: because of their adherence to Islam and their dress, they were known as "Arab traders". In more recent times, a number of Pakistani Urdu speakers have migrated to urban areas of South Africa.

Other sizable communities of Urdu speakers can be found in many Asian and African countries, as well as in the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia. In the UK, Urdu is one of the five most commonly spoken languages, used as a lingua franca by about 2 million British Asians.

Answer: Muslim immigrant families

Urdu is written from right to left in a modified form of the Persian alphabet, which comprises 39 or 40 distinct letters. The Nastaliq style of Perso-Arabic calligraphy in which the language is written, while considered aesthetically beautiful and a veritable art form, is very difficult to typeset - though now publications in Urdu are able to avail themselves of various software programmes. In India, Urdu is often written in the Devanagari script with some peculiar features that distinguish it from Hindi.

Roman Urdu, written in the Latin alphabet, was devised during the British Raj (1858-1947); its spread was helped by the low cost of Roman movable type. Now it is widely used on the Internet, especially by the younger generations communicating with their peers who cannot read the Arabic script (such as the children of immigrants raised and schooled in the West). Until the 1960s, Urdu was the dominant language among Christians in North India - though now superseded by English and Hindi; Roman Urdu Bibles are still published by the Bible Society of India. A version of Roman Urdu is also used in the Indian and Pakistani film industries (known respectively as Bollywood and Lollywood) for movie titles, as the Romanized versions of Urdu and Hindi are mutually intelligible.

Being strongly identified with the Muslim faith, Urdu would be very unlikely to be used in its Romanized version by observant Muslim families - immigrant or otherwise.

Answer: Formal/informal address pronouns

The emphasis on formality and politeness is one of Urdu's most significant features. Using words or grammar structures of Persian or Arabic rather than Hindustani origin indicates formal, higher-register speech - a bit like the use of words of Latin origin rather than their Germanic counterparts does in English. The observance of the rules of etiquette in Urdu (and Hindi) is called by the Arabic loanword "takalluf" (taking pains to be respectful). As happens in other languages, politeness is reflected in the vocabulary, which is selected with the utmost care as a mark of respect.

In this context, the correct use of address pronouns is of paramount importance. While English only has "you", Urdu has three different second-person pronouns. The most informal is "tu", which is always singular, and can be either very intimate or somewhat derogatory. "Tum" can be described as familiar, while "āp" indicates formality and respect: both of these pronouns can be either singular or plural. Romance languages such as French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese also use "tu" when addressing a single person informally; the German word is "du". All of these European languages also have formal address pronouns, which are often hard for English speakers to master correctly.

Urdu has two genders, masculine and feminine, and two numbers, singular and plural. Compared to English, verb conjugations are definitely not simple. As for grammatical cases, Urdu has three for nouns, and five for pronouns.

Answer: Assalamu alaykum

As Urdu is so strongly identified with Islam, it is not surprising that the language shares its most common form of greeting with other Muslim countries. Borrowed from Arabic, "assalamu alaykum" means "peace be upon you"; its short form is "salaam" (peace). The use of this expression as a greeting, however, is older than Islam, and is also common among non-Muslim speakers of Arabic. The correct response to this greeting is "walaykum assalam" (and unto you peace).

A more formal greeting, frequently used by non-Muslim Urdu speakers, is "adab arz hai" (shortened as "aadab"), which means "I offer my respects to you", and is usually accompanied by a gesture made with the right hand. To say goodbye, speakers of Urdu and other languages of Western and Central Asia use the Persian phrase "khuda hafiz" (shortened in "khodafez"), meaning "may God be your protector".

The three wrong answers mean "hello" in Korean (anyeong haseyo), Chinese (ni hao), and Māori (kia ora).

Answer: Sarong

During the colonial era, English acquired a large number of loanwords from the languages of the Indian subcontinent. Many of these words have their roots in Sanskrit, and are almost identical in Hindi and Urdu. The words borrowed from Urdu are in most cases of Persian or Arabic origin. Cummerbund, a word for a broad waist sash usually worn with a tuxedo, which comes from the Persian "kamarband" (waist-strap) through Urdu. Pajamas (or pyjamas) is also a word of Persian origin borrowed by English via Urdu: in Persian, "pay-jama" meant "foot/leg clothing". Khaki, a word denoting a light, yellowish shade of tan widely used for military uniforms, means "soil-coloured" in Urdu, and comes from the Persian "khak" (soil).

Other English words borrowed from Urdu are cushy (also of Persian origin), the nickname "Blighty" given to Great Britain, and possibly typhoon.

Sarong, denoting a kind of wrap skirt, comes from Malay; the dress itself has its origins in the same geographical area, thousands of miles east of the Indian subcontinent.