Is Urdu the Same as Arabic?
Westerners often harbor misconceptions about their neighbors in the Muslim world:
- That all Arabs are Muslim and all Muslims are Arabs.
- That all Muslims speak Arabic.
- That most Muslims live in the Middle East.
- That Pakistan is part of the Middle East.
- That Pakistan’s Urdu language is the same as Arabic.
Let’s tackle that last misconception and learn more about the poetic language of Urdu.
Urdu or Hindi?
Spoken Urdu sounds much like Hindi, one of the official languages of India. You might say that it’s basically Hindi, with lots of Persian, Arabic, and English mixed in. Indeed, Urdu and Hindi speakers can easily carry on a conversation. Both languages also descend from the same Indo-European language family.
Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, and the majority of its almost 248 million citizens understand it, even though only about 8 percent claim it as their first language. Urdu is also spoken in multiple states in India.
Written Urdu looks similar to Arabic, which makes sense: Both are written right to left, and about 30 percent of Urdu words (primarily nouns and adjectives) derive from Arabic. Arabic, however, belongs to a different language family entirely — not Indo-European but Afro-Asiatic — and is influenced by Hebrew, Aramaic, and Amharic (spoken in Ethiopia).
Their alphabets vary as well: Arabic contains 28 consonants and Urdu contains (a disputed) 39 or 40. So, even while the script looks similar, sentences are arranged differently and words might carry different meanings.
God’s mother tongue?
One translation site notes that Modern Standard Arabic (used in reading, writing, and the Quran) is considered “pure” Arabic. Yet most who speak Arabic grow up learning a colloquial form of the language.
Most Muslims believe Arabic to be the language of heaven. According to one Islamic website, “The first speech taught to men was the one taught by God Himself, and that this speech was Arabic — all other languages being the offsprings or offshoots of Arabic.”
Thus, Muslims around the world, regardless of their native tongue, must perform certain Islamic rites and rituals in Arabic or they will not be accepted by Allah (even if they do not speak or understand that language). This holds true for Pakistani Muslims who speak Urdu.
Indeed, according to one Christian ministry that reaches out to Muslims, “Muslims believe when they die they will be questioned by angels about their life and devotion to Allah, and they have to answer these questions in Arabic to pass the test.”
Do all other world languages spring from Arabic?
It’s true that many Arabic words appear in languages as varied as Spanish, Indonesian, and Swahili. In English, we can thank Arabic for words such as zero, algebra, alcohol, lime, and cotton, among others.
Yet translation experts claim that Arabic is not the world’s first language. Arabic belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language group and is descended from the Proto-Semitic language group. Not all languages spring from Arabic either. Consider the Uralic group, which includes Finnish and Hungarian and developed near the Ural Mountains in Russia. Not to mention the complete anomaly of the Basque language — unrelated to any other known language worldwide.
Urdu’s history
The very word Urdu comes from the Turkish word Ordu, which implies the military. It’s first recorded as being spoken in Delhi, India, during the Delhi Sultanate of 1206–1526 AD — which covers areas of current-day India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Turkish rule gave way to Muslim conquest, when leaders began using their Arabic script to record this local language.
Urdu script only includes consonants and long vowels; writers communicate the short vowels by where consonants stand in relation to each other. Almost all Urdu verbs developed locally; yet Urdu nouns and adjectives tie back to Persian and Arabic roots. According to the BBC, “Urdu is beautiful, vastly expressive, and the medium of some of the most powerful literature generated in the Indian sub-continent over the last two or three centuries.”
Life TV Pakistan chooses to convey the life-changing message of the gospel in the beautiful, expressive language of Urdu. To learn more about the teaching and fellowship we offer to Pakistan’s Urdu-speakers, please visit our website.
---
Sources: “The Indo-European Family,” University of Ottawa, uottawa.ca; “What Languages Are Spoken in Pakistan?” worldatlas.com; “Difference between Urdu and Arabic,” 24x7offshoring.com; “Literary Notes: Common Misconceptions About Urdu” by Rauf Parekh, Aug. 25, 2014, dawn.com; “Arabic Language History,” todaytranslations.com; “Arabic, the mother of all languages,” alislam.org; “How Islam Uses Arabic to Hide the Truth” by Call of Love Ministries, Aug. 8, 2022, calloflove.org; “English Words That Come From Arabic,” arabacademy.com; “Delhi Sultanate,” en.wikipedia.org; “Uncommon Tongue: Pakistan’s Confusing Move to Urdu” by M Ilyas Khan, Sept. 12, 2015, bbc.com
* For security purposes, names are changed to protect the identity of viewers. Life TV Pakistan uses stock images.