Myths and facts about Lashkari ('urdu')

Many people have the false impression, especially those illiterate in the field of linguistics, that 'Urdu', or natively Lashkari, is an "admixture" of Persian (Parsi), Arabic and Turkish because of it's vocabulary.
This notion is false.

In the rules of linguistics, borrowed words do not reflect a languages' grammatical structure. In the case of Lashkari), the input of vocabulary from Chagatai, Arabic and Farsi should hardly be surprising to anyone.

Almost every spoken language today carries borrowed vocabulary from a different language(s) weather related or unrelated. It does not reflect the languages' grammatical structure. It's the grammatical components which include phonetics, morphological usages, phonology, syntax and semantics which determines a languages' family classification as well as key fundamental concepts present/absent depending on the language.

Closely related languages generally have all these grammatical components common to them. Distantly related languages have only some of these grammatical components common to them but almost always have common semantics and morphology.

Borrowed words have no relevance when studying a languages' grammatical structure and it's genetic relationship to other languages.

Take for example the English word "Tycoon" borrowed from Japanese meaning rich, powerful person. Now only a fool would consider English a "relative" of Japanese or consider Japanese as some sort of 'factor language' to English because of a borrowed word(s).

Similarly the Arabic and Chagatai words in what is today called 'Urdu' or Lashkari do not really make it their "relative" or a "product" of these languages.

As the charts below show, Urdu is an Indo-European language, meaning it is not related to Arabic or Turkish. Arabic is an Afro-Asiatic language and Turkish is an Altaic language. Neither the Afro-Asiatic nor Altaic family have been proven to be related to the Indo-European family, though there is the Nostratic theory which claims the language families of Altaic, Afro-Asiatic, Indo-European, Uralic and Dravidian belong to a common super language family. So far this theory is still unproven.

While mentioning Turkish, Farsi and Arabic, I'd like to draw upon the fact that they carry heavy vocabulary borrowed from one another.
In fact a lot of Lashkari's Arabic vocabulary was inherited through Farsi and the Turkic language of the Mughals, which was already carrying heavy Arabic vocabulary for centuries.

So why is it then that Turkish (or any other language for that matter) is not called a "mix" of Arabic and Parsi? The answer linguistics gives us is the same: borrowing words does not constitute a languages' family status.

The Afro-Asiatic language family tree: (click on images to enlarge)


The Altaic language family tree:

The Indo-European language family tree. A basic chart as it doesn't include many subfamilies such as Dardic or Anatolian, you can still spot the major Indo-European languages such as English & Urdu:


So why do then people ignorantly think of Urdu to be a "mixture of languages?" Many reasons can be provided for this:

Borrowed vocabulary- This is the main reason. However as stated before, almost every language borrowed vocabulary from other languages, provided there is no grammar conflict between the borrowed word and the language borrowing it.
If people observed this better in other languages, this misconception would not exist. Sindhi is said to have more Arabic vocabulary than Lashakri, yet it is not called a "mixed language." Arabic words can be found in Pashto, Parsi, Kashmiri, Balochi, Punjabi, Sindhi, Turkish etc.


The people who spoke Urdu were the Mughals who were a Turko-Persian force- The Mughals developed Urdu by deriving it from Sanskrit. They were an empire ruled by Persians but with an army of mainly ethnic Turko-Mongols.
This did not mean it was their native language. Prior to the adoption of Urdu as their official court language, they used Persian/Farsi. At one time they also spoke Turkic languages.
This is where Urdu/Lashkari gained most of it's Turkic, Persian and Arabic vocabulary (mostly gained through Persian which contains many Arabic loanwords).

The belief that Urdu is a Turkic word- Actually Urdu is derived from the word Ordu used in many Turkic languages meaning "army."
The general consensus is that before Hindi/Hindui and Urdu/Lashkari are two independent dialects of one Hindustani language.
The term "Hindu" does not refer to the people today perceived as 'Hindus.' See The Invention of the Hindu and The English Invention of Hinduism.

When Hindustani came into existence during the Mughal era, it slowly started to be known as "Zaban-i-Ordu" meaning language of the royal army camp. Eventually for short is became just known as Ordu for short and eventually re-pronounced as Urdu, which the locals referred to as Lashkari in native translation.

With the rise of the Hindutva propaganda against the Muslims, resentment rose over the use of Turkic, Arabic and Parsi vocabulary in Hindustani. This resulted in the inserting of Sanskrit words never used before in Hindustani to replace the Arabic, Turkic and Farsi words.
And with the resentment over a name from a Chagatai derived word, Hindi was their own name for the language.

The fact that the Mughals (a corruption of the word Mongol) spoke and developed a language derived from Sanskrit did not mean it was native to them. Their attempts to speak languages native to the subcontinent was a result of an attempt to communicate with the surrounding Indo-Iranic speaking populations they had settled within.

Anyone regardless of nationality or ethnicity can speak any language of any family. This does not change the status of the language or the person speaking it.

Urdu uses the Persio-Arabic script; hence people believe it is closer to the languages spoken in the Middle East- The usage of any particular script does not reflect the structure or a family status of a language.
For example modern Turkish uses the Latin script, it does not make it a relative of languages spoken in Europe.

A sample of the modern Turkish script:

Bütün insanlar hür, haysiyet ve haklar bakımından eşit doğarlar. Akıl ve vicdana sahiptirler ve birbirlerine karşı kardeşlik zihniyeti ile hareket etmelidirler.

Prior to that there was the Ottoman Turkish language which used the same Perseo-Arabic script. Prior to that, the Turkic peoples used their own indigenous script before adopting Perso-Arabic script. Here is an artifact found in North Eastern Asia:


Here is a more accurate sample of the original Turkic alphabet:



Parsi (Persian) is also another language that today uses Perseo-Arabic script with modifications to suit the language (which is the reason why it's called Perseo-Arabic script), but it has not changed the Indo-European roots of the language.
Prior to the adoption of Perso-Arabic script by Persian speakers, the language had it's own script in ancient times:


Likewise, the application of Perso-Arabic script to Lashkari does not change it's Indo-European status.

Another example is Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian use Latin script for their languages. But this does not make them relatives of other European languages.
Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian are still Uralic languages.

Urdu's roots can be traced back to Sanskrit, which all Indo-Aryan languages are traced to. This language is said to have used Devanāgarī alphabet.

Pseudoscience propagated by Islamists- This is a key factor to misconceptions. Islamists despise Urdu's pre-Islamic roots and don't want to be associated with it so they spread bogus ideas such as Muhammed Bin Qasim being "the first Pakistani" or Urdu having Arabic and Turkic roots.
Islamists have always tried to link Pakistanis with the Middle East and taught them without Islam they are simply "Indians" which is another lie, since the people of Pakistan lived in the land of Pakistan for thousands of years with a mostly independent history from the people of India.
Even the name India has it's origins in Pakistan not vice versa. From Sapta Sindhu (land of the rivers) came Indu. From Indu came Indus. From Indus came India.

A last few notes are to be added to this post. Though Lashkari is not derived from Parsi, it is still a close relative of that language as people understand. But that relationship has been confused.
Urdu and Farsi are both derived from Proto-Indo-Iranic, making Lashkari a close relative of Parsi and not an "offspring" of it. Refer to the chart posted below:

Also what many people who ignorantly claim Parsi to be a "parent" of Lashkari don't realize that despite it's close common origin with Parsi, the language does not have grammatical gender distinction.

Lashkari has grammatical gender mainly in verbs, tenses, possessive pronouns and less often in adjectives. Some words for animals are gender based and verbs/tenses applied to objects are also gender based depending on the sound of the object, usually "aa" for masculine and "ee" for feminine.
If an object has a gender neutral sound, then the masculine verb form is usually applied. The same is true for plural form unless the entire plural collective nouns are feminine.

In English grammatical gender is found mainly in personal pronouns and possessive pronouns. In English an example of grammatical gender would be the phrase "he does go" or "she does go."
Grammatical gender is shown in the personal pronoun; whereas the same phrase in Lashkari shows the present indefinite tense having the grammatical gender as "wo jata hai" for male and "wo jati hai" for female.

Parsi has no form of grammatical gender wheather in verbs, tenses, adjectives or any pronouns.

Though the Nostratic theory states that Altaic, Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic might be related, it still would not make Lashkari an 'offspring' of Arabic and the Turkic languages, but rather having a common origin and being a very distant relative of them. If a common Nostratic origin is found, it may have been with a Nostratic language spoken perhaps well over 10,000 years ago.

A small basic chart of the proposed Nostratic family:


A more detailed chart of the proposed family though the placement, inclusion and arrangement of the languages is disputed by some linguists and anthropologists: