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Pakistan's Official
Language
The language of the road, and the national language of Pakistan, is Urdu, It unites all people and all communities, whatever their mother tongue. It is spoken as far north as Chitral, Gilgit and Skardu and as far south as Thatta and Karachi. The word Urdu is of Turkish origin and means 'army' or 'camp' (the English word 'horde' has the same roots)-- so Urdu is, quite simply, the language of the camp. Scholars say that it developed in the Punjab and neighbouring territories about one thousand years ago out of a mixture of local languages and of the Persian language spoken by invading armies from the northern Persian that, incidentally, included many words borrowed from Arabic and Turkish. Urdu is graceful and poetic with no over-1harsh gutterals to cause a foreigner to stumble in his/her pronunciation. It is also a language that lends itself to scholarship and artistic endeavour and that rests on a vast and elegant body of literature and poetry going back some 700 years. Most notably, however, it is a polite and gentle language which, in its forms of speech, recognizes the basic equality of all humanity, bestowing equal respect on the servant and the master, the courtier and the king........
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August '1999