What is "urdu"

Urdu \Ur"du\, n. [Hind. urd[=u].] The language more generally called Hindustanee.

official language of Pakistan, 1796, from Hindustani urdu "camp," from Turkish ordu (source of horde); short for zaban-i-urdu "language of the camp." Compare Dzongkha, a variant of Tibetan and the official language of Bhutan, literally "the language of the fortress." "So named because it grew up since the eleventh century in the camps of the Mohammedan conquerors of India as a means of communication between them and the subject population of central Hindustan." [Century Dictionary]

Urdu (; ALA-LC: ; , or Modern Standard Urdu) is a standardised register of the Hindustani language. It is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, and an official language of six states of India. It is also one of the 22 official languages recognized in the Constitution of India.

Urdu is historically associated with the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. Apart from specialized vocabulary, Urdu is mutually intelligible with Standard Hindi, which is associated with the Hindu community. The Urdu language received recognition and patronage under British rule when the British replaced the Persian and local official languages with the Urdu and English languages in the North Indian regions of Jammu and Kashmir in 1846 and Punjab in 1849.

Urdu was an experimental pop music group that formed in California, United States in 1983. It was a trio consisting of ambient musician and multi-instrumentalist Robert Rich, guitarist Rick Davies and bassist Andrew McGowan. This group marked the culmination of a five-year period of experimental collaborations between Rich and Davies. Davies once described Urdu's style as "loud, angular glurp music", glurp being a term used by Rich to describe his vocabulary of seemingly organic sounds.

They performed several concerts in the San Francisco Bay Area. One of their last performances as Urdu was a live radio broadcast in 1984. Some of their accumulated recordings were released as a self-titled cassette album the following year.

In the years that followed, Rich received increased attention for his solo ambient work. In 1992 Robert Rich and Andrew McGowan formed a quartet called Amoeba. In 1994 Robert Rich and Rick Davies formed a second version of Amoeba.

Urdu (1985) is the only album released by the experimental pop music group Urdu, a trio composed of Robert Rich, Rick Davies, and Andrew McGowan. The group worked together under this name from 1983 to 1984. This album of its accumulated recordings was released in 1985, after Urdu’s members moved on to other projects.

Urdu may refer to:

• Modern Standard Urdu, the national language of Pakistan and an official language of India
• Hindustani before the separation of literary Hindi and Urdu
• Urdu alphabet, the right-to-left alphabet used for the Urdu language
• Urdu literature, with a long history that is tied to the development of the Urdu language
• Urdu poetry, a rich tradition of poetry in Urdu
• Urdu Digest, a Pakistani periodical published in the tradition of Reader's Digest
• Urdu Informatics, the research and contributions to bring the utilities and usage of Urdu to the modern information and communication technologies in education and business
• Urdu keyboard, a layout for Urdu computers and typewriters
• Ordu, a city in Turkey