Basic Information about the Urdu Language.

Urdu language is mutually intelligible with Standard Hindi language spoken in India. Both languages share the same Indo-Aryan base and are so similar in basic structure, grammar and to a large extent, vocabulary and phonology, that they appear to be one language. From the 13th century until the end of the 18th century the commonly known language from Delhi to the Awadh region was Hindvi language. The language was also known by various other names such as Hindavi and Dehlavi. Standard Hindvi language was first developed by the Turkish speakers of Khari Boli who migrated from Delhi to the Awadh region, most notably Amir Khusrau. They mixed the roughness of the Khari Boli with the relative softness of Awadhi to form a new language which they called "Hindvi."

Hindvi language later developed into Hindustani language, which further diverged as Hindi and Urdu. The first Hindustani book "Woh Majlis" was written in 1728. The name Urdu was first used by the poet Ghulam Hamadani Mushafi around 1780. The Urdu language received recognition and patronage under the British Raj when the British replaced the Persian and local official languages of North Indian Jammu and Kashmir state with the Urdu and English language in 1846 and in Punjab in 1877.

Persian was no longer the language of administration in British India with the advent of the British Raj but the Hindustani language still wrote in the Persian script continued to be used by both Hindus and Muslims in northwestern India. The Hindustani language was promoted in British India by British policies to counter the previous emphasis on Persian. This triggered a Hindu backlash in northwestern India, which argued that the language should be written in the native Devanagari script. Thus a new literary register, called "Hindi", replaced traditional Hindustani language as the official language of Bihar in 1881, establishing a sectarian divide of "Urdu" for Muslims and "Hindi" for Hindus.

The British administrators of India and the Christian missionaries played an important role in the creation and promotion of the Khariboli-based Hindustani language into Modern Standard Hindustani language. In 1800, the British East India Company established a college of higher education in Calcutta named the Fort William College. John Borthwick Gilchrist, a president of that college, encouraged the professors of college to write in their native tongue; some of the works thus produced were in the literary form of the modern Hindustani language. With the government patronage and the literary popularity, the Khariboli-based Hindustani language flourished, even as the use of previously more literary tongues such as Awadhi, Braj, and Maithili declined in the literary vehicles. The literary works in the Hindustani language gained momentum from the second half of the 19th century onwards. Gradually, in the subsequent years, Khariboli-based Hindustani language became the basis for the standard Hindustani language, which began to be taught in the schools and used in the government functions.

Khariboli is also known as Dehlavi, Kauravi, and Hindustani. Khariboli is admitted as a prestige dialect of Hindi and Urdu also standard register and literary style of Hindi and Urdu. It is a Western Hindi dialect spoken mainly in the rural surroundings of Delhi, the areas of Western Uttar Pradesh and the southern areas of Uttarakhand in India. Khariboli of Delhi developed under the influence of Persian, Arabic, and Turkic languages over the course of almost 900 years. It originated in the region of Uttar Pradesh in the Indian subcontinent during the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1527) and continued to develop under the Mughal Empire (1526–1858). The earliest examples of Khariboli can be seen in the compositions of Amir Khusro (1253-1355). Before the rise of Khari Boli, the literary dialects adopted by the Bhakti saints were; Braj Bhasha by the Krishna devotees, Awadhi by the Rama devotees and Maithili by the Vaishnavites of Bihar. The area around Delhi has long been the center of power in northern India. Therefore, naturally, the Khariboli dialect came to be regarded as urbane and of a higher standard than the other dialects of northern India.

Khariboli-based Hindustani language gradually gained ground over the 19th century. Otherwise, before that period, other dialects such as Awadhi, Braj Bhasha and Maithili were the dialects preferred by littérateurs. Urdu, the heavily Persianalized version of Khariboli, had replaced Persian as the literary language of North India by the early 20th century. However, the association of Urdu with the Muslims prompted the Hindus to develop their own Sanskritized version of the dialect, leading to the formation of the Modern Standard Hindi. Urdu is 21st most spoken languages of the world. There are around 67 million native speakers of Urdu in the world. There were 52 million in India and 14.7 million in Pakistan as per the 2017 census. Several hundred thousand Urdu speakers are in the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, UAE, United States, Canada, and Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, they are called Bihari.

Urdu is one of the officially recognized languages in India and has an official language status in the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Telangana, Jammu and Kashmir and the Indian capital, New Delhi. In Pakistan, as per 2017 census, Urdu speaking population in Sindh is 8,709,610, in Punjab 5,356,464, in KPK 274,581, in Islamabad 244,966, in Balochistan 99,913, in FATA 24,465, and it makes 14,709,999 or 7.08% total Urdu speaking population out of 207,685,000 population of Pakistan. The first most spoken language of Pakistan is Punjabi, second is Pushto, third is Sindhi, fourth is Saraiki and Urdu is the fifth most spoken language of Pakistan as per the 2017 census. 93% of Pakistan's population has a native language other than Urdu. Despite this fact, Urdu was implemented as a national language of Pakistan by the first Urdu Speaking Hindustani Muhajir Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan and still, it is implemented in Pakistan.