Similarities Between Persian and Urdu

In this language challenge, two Urdu speakers from Pakistan, Rabia and Sara, compete against two Persian speakers from Iran, Shiva and Shahrzad.

We explore the similarities between the two languages with a list of words, phrases, and sentences. There are many similarities between the two languages, but are they similar enough to be intelligible to one another?

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Persian (Farsi) and Urdu are both Indo-European languages and are both classified as Indo-Iranian. Persian is an older language, primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, as well as other parts of the Middle East, Central and South Asia. Urdu, however, is a relatively newer language, created in the late Middle Ages along with Ottoman Turkish, and Chagatai, as a new Islamic literary languages modeled after Persian. They are regarded as "structural daughter languages" of Persian. Modern Standard Urdu is a Persianised and standardised register language of the Hindustani language. It is the official national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. In India, it is one of the official languages recognized in the Constitution of India, having official status in the five states of Jammu and Kashmir, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and Jharkhand, as well as the national capital territory of Delhi. The Persian language has also led to the formation of several newer languages in West Asia, Europe, Central Asia, and South Asia. For centuries prior to the British colonization, Persian was widely used as a second language in the Indian subcontinent.

Note: To the concerned viewers, our Pakistani friends in this video also had tea, they finished theirs prior to recording and left their cups in the living room.