World Language Map

Where is Urdu spoken?

Urdu (اردو) is an Indo-European language, spoken in Pakistan, India, the United Kingdom, Canada and 3 more. The outlined area on the map shows where.

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The filter only changes what is drawn. Tap the map to list every language at a spot, whichever family is shown. You can also pick any family from its own page.

Key

Language families (largest ten)

  • Atlantic-Congo
  • Austronesian
  • Sino-Tibetan
  • Indo-European
  • Afro-Asiatic
  • Nuclear Trans New Guinea
  • Otomanguean
  • Austroasiatic
  • Tai-Kadai
  • Pama-Nyungan

Everything else

  • All other families Smaller families, isolates and unclassified languages.
  • Point A language with no area map. The dot sits at its Glottolog position, in its family colour.

How to read the map. Each colour is a language family: a group of languages that share a common ancestor. The ten largest families have their own colour and every other family is grey. Areas are see-through, so where two languages share a place the colours mix. Tap anywhere to list every language whose area covers that spot. Areas are generalisations drawn from published atlases, many of them decades old, and cities are multilingual, so an area never says that everyone there speaks the language. A dot marks a language that has no area map. The family name is always given in words, because colour alone is hard to tell apart for some people.

Where Urdu is spoken

Urdu is spoken in 7 countries: Pakistan, India, the United Kingdom, Canada and 3 more. The table gives the share of each country’s people who speak it, from Unicode CLDR, where CLDR has a figure.

CountryShare of populationEstimated speakers
Pakistan95%239,745,800
India5%70,456,500
United Kingdom3.5%2,396,068
Canada1.1%426,743
Mauritius5.2%68,146
AfghanistanNot givenNot given
BangladeshNot givenNot given

Estimated speakers are the CLDR percentage applied to CLDR’s own population figure for the country, so they are rough. A country without a figure may still have speakers: it is listed because the language area, or Glottolog’s record, reaches it.

On the map, Urdu is drawn as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007. The area was digitised by the Glottography project (doi:10.5281/zenodo.18613195), and the atlas is cited on the data sources page. Language areas are generalisations, and cities and borderlands are multilingual, so the outline does not mean that everyone inside it speaks Urdu.

How many people speak Urdu?

Wikidata gives about 68.6 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). It also lists about 94 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 1999). These figures are approximate: they come from different sources, years and definitions of a speaker.

Status: Not endangered. Glottolog lists it as not endangered: it is still being passed on to children.

Where Urdu sits in the language family tree

Glottolog classifies Urdu as follows, from the largest family down to the language itself.

  1. Indo-European
  2. Classical Indo-European
  3. Indo-Iranian
  4. Indo-Aryan
  5. Middle-Modern Indo-Aryan
  6. Continental Indo-Aryan
  7. Midlands Indo-Aryan
  8. Shaurasenic
  9. Indo-Aryan Central zone
  10. Western Hindi
  11. Hindustani
  12. Urdu

Related languages

Other languages in the Hindustani group:

More about Urdu

Codes: ISO 639-3 urd, Glottolog urdu1245. Glottolog macroarea: Eurasia.

Questions about Urdu

Where is Urdu spoken?

Urdu is spoken in Pakistan, India, the United Kingdom, Canada and 3 more. Unicode CLDR puts it at 95% of the population of Pakistan, which is about 239,745,800 people. On the map it is shown as an area from Asher and Moseley 2007.

How many people speak Urdu?

Wikidata gives about 68.6 million first-language speakers (Ethnologue, 2019). Speaker numbers are approximate and differ between sources: counting who is a speaker, and whether to include second-language speakers, is not settled. It also lists about 94 million second-language speakers (Ethnologue, 1999).

Which language family is Urdu in?

Glottolog places Urdu in the Indo-European family, in the branch Classical Indo-European, Indo-Iranian, Indo-Aryan, Middle-Modern Indo-Aryan, Continental Indo-Aryan, Midlands Indo-Aryan, Shaurasenic, Indo-Aryan Central zone, Western Hindi and Hindustani.

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