Urdu (; اُردُو, pronounced [ʊɾduː] , ALA-LC: Urdū) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in South Asia. It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. In India, it is an Eighth Schedule language, the status and cultural heritage of which are recognised by the Constitution of India. It also has an official status in several Indian states. Urdu and Hindi share a common, predominantly Sanskrit- and Prakrit-derived, vocabulary base, phonology, syntax, and grammar, making them mutually intelligible during colloquial communication. The common base of the two languages is sometimes referred to as the Hindustani language, or Hindi-Urdu, and Urdu has been described as a Persianised standard register of the Hindustani language. While formal Urdu draws literary, political, and technical vocabulary from Persian, formal Hindi draws these aspects from Sanskrit; consequently, the two languages' mutual intelligibility effectively decreases as the factor of formality increases. Urdu originated in what is today the Meerut division of Western Uttar Pradesh, a region adjoining Old Delhi and geographically in the upper Ganga-Jumna doab, or the interfluve between the Yamuna and Ganges rivers in India; significant development of the language also occurred in the Deccan Plateau. In 1837, Urdu became an official language of the British East India Company, replacing Persian across northern India during Company rule; Persian had until this point served as the court language of various Indo-Islamic empires. Religious, social, and political factors arose during the European colonial period that advocated a distinction between Urdu and Hindi, leading to the Hindi–Urdu controversy. According to 2022 estimates by Ethnologue and The World Factbook, produced by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Urdu is the 10th-most widely spoken language in the world, with 230 million total speakers, including those who speak it as a second language. Source: Wikipedia (en)