The 21st most spoken first language in the world, Urdu is the official national language and lingua franca of Pakistan and Muslims in the north and northwest British India. Urdu is a Turkic word meaning Horde. It is an Indo-Aryan language chiefly spoken in South Asia and shares a common vocabulary base, similar phonology and syntax with Hindi which has been labeled as a standardized and Sanskritized register of the Hindustani language making them lucid in everyday language. In 1837 the language was endorsed by the colonial administrators during the British reign to replace Persian, which was the court language of the Indo-Islamic empires. Subsequently, colonial Muslim communities in India began to see Urdu as a symbol of their religious identity. Even though it got associated with the cultural identity of ordinary Muslims in India aforetime it was used in places where there were large Muslim minorities or cities that were bases for Muslim empires and Hindus alike spoke the same language. Religious and socio-political tones in the early nineteenth century contributed to the rise of the Urdu register and was used to establish a conclusive Islamic identity of the Muslim inhabitants in British India. Urdu has some standard dialects, including Dakhni, Dhakaiya, Rekhta, and modern vernacular Urdu that is based on the Khariboli dialect of the Delhi region. Dakhni (also called Dakani, Deccani, Desia, Mirgan) is spoken in the Deccan region of southern India. An ethnoreligious group of Muslims called Deccani Muslims or the Deccanis, (also known as the Deccani People) who form the second largest ethnic group reside or trace their parentage from the Deccan region of Southern and Central India like Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Karnataka, and in the cities of Hyderabad and Aurangabad and they speak a distinct variety of Urdu known as Deccani.
Following the partition of British India and the takeover of Hyderabad, large migration communities formed outside the Deccan, especially in Pakistan, where they set up a considerable part of the Urdu speaking minority, the Muhajirs. The Hyderabadis (from Hyderabad Deccan), Mysoris (from Mysore state), and Madrasis (from Madras state) are chief among several groups of the Deccani People. Deccani Urdu is the vernacular dialect of most Muslims in the states of Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and Northern Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Dakhni Muslims are the one who belong to the Deccan region of South India are categorised as the Dakhni Urdu-speaking Muslims. They are a lot alike their co-religionists in other parts of South India, like the Urdu-speaking Muslims in Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Maharashtra, and, to a lesser degree, with the Urdu-speaking Muslims of north India. Dakhni Muslims were further divided into the Sunni and Shia sects. ‘Dakhni Muslim’ is a canopy classification, which comprises intra-cultural schisms based on the myths of origin of the different groups such as the Navayats, Syeds, Sheikhs, and Pathans. Urdu speaking Muslims in Tamil Nadu or the Dakhni Muslim group has been an elite religious denomination just like the Tamil Brahmin and do not promote inter-marriages or relationships among other Muslim sects. In line with the colonial era, the Northern Indian Muslims who were proficient in Persian and Urdu were considered as an elite sect by the British rulers and labelled them as ‘pure and real’ Muslims than those who were competent in Tamil and Arabic. This resulted in a divide of Urdu among the natives. Today, Urdu is used by a multitude of people - migrants, immigrants, and their children in the major urban cities in the UK, USA, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, and Australia and is among the immigrant dialects with the most number in Catalonia.
