Urdu in the United Kingdom
Urdu is the fourth most commonly spoken language in the United Kingdom.According to the 2011 census, 269,000 people listed Urdu as their main language. Ethnologue reports the total number of Urdu-speakers in the UK at over 400,000.In 1990s some Urdu weekly fortnightly and monthly Urdu language periodicals used to get published from UK.
Challenges
Britain's Anglophone tradition and inheritance centralises English as the national lingua and vernacular. Radical opportunities exist however for the productive growth of minority Commonwealth migrant languages such as Urdu and Punjabi, particularly in curriculum-based education.Use in politics
When Pakistani-origin Scottish MSP Bashir Ahmad was elected to the Scottish parliament in 2007, he took his oath in both English and Urdu.
Queen Victoria was taught to write Urdu by her Indian Muslim servant Abdul Karim.
