Urdu
Description
Urdu is the lingua franca of Pakistan, spoken or understood by at least 90 million people in that country, and is the primary language of literacy and of media both print and electronic. Additionally it is one of India's national languages, used by many Muslims and non-Muslims alike across the northern plain. It belongs to the Indo-European language family and is an Indo-Aryan language, ultimately descended from Sanskrit as are other North Indian languages such as Bengali and Gujarati. Among these related languages, Urdu has especially close affinities with Punjabi. On an everyday spoken level it is virtually indistinguishable from Hindi,making it useful as a means of communication with approximately half a billion people. The main difference lies in the orthography, a modified Arabic consonantal script, which reflects Urdu's place as one of South Asia's elite languages of Islamic scholarship.
The Urdu language also boasts one of the world's richest literary traditions. Classical poetry in Urdu was linked with courtly life,and aristocratic patrons were responsible for its growth in the Deccan and its transfer as a literary language in the salons of Delhi and Lucknow in the eighteenth century. Along with ghazals, composed of couplets strung together, Urdu poets composed verse romances(masnavi), odes (qasida) and elegies (marsiya). Stories that hadalways been told orally began to be written down under colonial British patronage, and prose fiction developed in novelistic andstory form. Urdu was the medium for one of the subcontinent's most famous encounters with modernism, the Progressive movement. After independence, Urdu poets composed anarchist and modernist verse, as well as experimental short stories and novels. The language has also served as the medium for a complex intellectual tradition, including essays and treatises on speculative philosophy, religion, and political commentary.
Instructor
Ms. Rubab Qureshi
Email
rubab@sas.upenn.edu