Gulzar, the recipient of the Jnanpith Award, expresses optimism about the future of Urdu. He believes that despite the decline of the Urdu script, the language itself is alive and thriving, with Urdu ...

Why has this heartbeat become a cause of heart burn? Why is it in exile in its own country? These lines by poet Manzar Bhopali encapsulate the uncertainty Urdu, a part of the Hindostani language ...

The Supreme Court ordered on Tuesday the implementation of Urdu as the official language at all government departments, Express News reported. A three-member bench of the apex court headed by Chief ...

Hyderabad: Urdu is a Lashkari (mixed dialect). It is a Persianised standard register of Hindustani language. It has 30 consonants, 20 vowels, two diphthongs; non-tonal; stress being on the penultimate ...

Who does Urdu belong to? India's right-wing seems to think it's a foreign import, forced upon by so-called Islamic invaders. The latest fracas happened in April when a reporter from a far-right news ...

The National Language Authority (NLA), or Muqtadira Qaumi Zaban, was established in 1979 under Article 251 of the 1973 Constitution. The main objective was to pave the way for adoption of Urdu as ...

Zeerak Ahmed has spent years in the U.S., working for some of the world’s biggest tech companies. But one thing he has grown frustrated with is how “computing treats non-Latin languages as second ...

Javed Akhtar challenges the misconception that Urdu is a Muslim language, emphasizing it's region-specific, not religion-specific. During an event, he asserted that Urdu and Hindi were equals until ...

A view of the Supreme Court of India building, an apex judicial body of the country, in New Delhi.(HT_PRINT) The Supreme Court on April 15 upheld the use of Urdu on the signboards of a municipal ...

In the 1930s, no foreign language was more dominant in Afghanistan than Urdu. At no time in Afghanistan’s history did Urdu have more influence in the corridors of power in Kabul than in the 1930s.

That the two founding figures of Indian and Pakistani independence were united by a shared love of Urdu speaks eloquently of the language’s rich history. From left, Pandit Jawarharlal Nehru, Vice ...

It’s on a Tuesday evening in January, under a canopy of incandescent bulbs, that I receive my first lesson in Urdu: the difference between alcohol and mirages.I am part of a small mehfil gathered in ...