Hindi-Urdu - Official Status

Official Status

Urdu, the original standardized register of Hindi-Urdu, is the national language of Pakistan, where it shares official language status with English. Although English is used in most elite circles, and Punjabi and Pashto has a plurality of native speakers, Urdu is the lingua franca and is expected to prevail. Urdu is also one of the official languages of India, and in the Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, and Uttar Pradesh, Urdu has official language status. While the government school system in most other states emphasises Modern Standard Hindi, at universities in cities such as Lucknow, Aligarh and Hyderabad, Urdu is spoken and learned and is regarded as a language of prestige.

Hindi, the other standardized register of Hindi-Urdu, is declared by the Constitution of India as the "official language (rājabhāshā) of the Union" (Art. 343(1)) (In this context, 'Union' means the Federal Government and not the entire country - India has 23 official languages). At the same time, however, the definitive text of Federal laws is officially the English text and proceedings in the higher appellate courts must be conducted in English. At the state level, Hindi is an official language in 9 of the 28 Indian states and three Union Territories (namely Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, and Haryana and UTs are Delhi, Chandigarh, Andaman and Nicobar Islands). In the remaining states Hindi is not an official language. In the state of Tamil Nadu studying Hindi is not compulsory in the state curriculum. However an option to take the same as second or third language does exist. In many other states, studying Hindi is usually compulsory in the school curriculum as a third language (the first two languages being the state's official language and English), though the intensiveness of Hindi in the curriculum varies.

Hindi-Urdu, under the name "Hindustani", was the official language of India at the time of the British Raj, ending with the partition of India in 1947; the term was a synonym for Urdu. After independence, the Sub-Committee on Fundamental Rights recommended that the official language of India be Hindustani, as it was already the national language:

"Hindustani, written either in Devanagari or the Persian script at the option of the citizen, shall, as the national language, be the first official language of the Union."

However, this recommendation was not adopted by the Constituent Assembly.