Urdu is a language of South Asia. It is the national language of Pakistan and one of the official languages of India, where large numbers of people speak it — especially Muslim communities across the north. Perhaps 230 million people speak it in some form. The important fact for a learner: in everyday speech, Urdu and Hindi are close to the same language. A speaker of one understands a speaker of the other with almost no trouble, and linguists often treat them as two versions of one thing called Hindustani. Where they split is in writing and in formal or literary words. Urdu is written in a flowing Arabic-based script, right to left, and reaches to Persian and Arabic for its high vocabulary; Hindi is written in Devanagari, left to right, and reaches to Sanskrit. So a news broadcast in each sounds fairly different, while two friends chatting sound nearly identical. Urdu also has a long and much-loved poetry tradition — the ghazal — and it is the main language of a great deal of Pakistani film, song and drama. The word works as a noun ('she speaks Urdu') and as an adjective before another noun ('Urdu poetry', 'an Urdu newspaper'). Being a language name, it always takes a capital U.