Urdu voice over services

Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and one of the official languages of India, written in the Perso-Arabic script in the flowing Nastaliq style, right to left. Its relationship with Hindi is the question clients ask most often, and the honest answer is that it changes depending on how formal your script is.

In casual speech they are effectively the same language. An Urdu speaker and a Hindi speaker hold a conversation without difficulty and without either noticing a border. A conversational commercial, a piece of dialogue, a friendly explainer — one recording can often serve both audiences.

In formal register they separate. Urdu builds its higher vocabulary from Persian and Arabic; Hindi builds its from Sanskrit. So a news bulletin, a legal notice, a compliance module or a technical manual in formal Urdu is not transparent to a Hindi-speaking audience, and the reverse is equally true. The more formal the script, the further apart they move.

The practical consequence is that the useful question is not *are they the same language* but how formal is this script. We will read yours and tell you whether one recording covers both markets or whether you need two. That answer is worth having before the budget is set rather than after.

And Urdu is a British audience language too: at the 2021 census it was the fourth most common main language in England and Wales, with around 270,000 speakers, just behind Punjabi. Public-health, local-authority and financial campaigns aimed at UK audiences use it for that reason.