URDU - The official language of Pakistan

Urdu is a Central Indo-Aryan language of the Indo-Iranian branch, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. It is the national language and one of the two official languages (the other being English) of Pakistan. Being spoken in five Indian states, it is also one of the official languages of India. Its vocabulary developed under Persian, Arabic, Turkic and Sanskrit. In modern times Urdu vocabulary has been significantly influenced by Punjabi and even English. Urdu was mainly developed in western Uttar Pradesh, India, but began taking shape during the Delhi Sultanate as well as Mughal Empire (1526–1858) in the Indian Subcontinent.

Language scholars independently categorize Urdu as a standardised register of Hindustani termed the standard dialect Khariboli. The grammatical description in this article concerns this standard Urdu. In general, the term "Urdu" can encompass dialects of Hindustani other than the standardised versions. The original language of the Mughals had been Turkic, but after their arrival in South Asia, they came to adopt Persian and later Urdu.

The word Urdu is believed to be derived from the Turkic or Mongolian word 'Ordu', which means army encampment. It was initially called Zabān-e-Ordu-e-Mu'alla "language of the Exalted Camp" (in Persian) and later just Urdu. It obtained its name from Urdu Bazar, i.e. encampment (Urdu in Turkic) market, the market near the Red Fort in the walled city of Delhi.

Standard Urdu has approximately the twentieth largest population of native speakers, among all languages.

Urdu is often contrasted with Hindi, another standardised form of Hindustani. The main differences between the two are that Standard Urdu is conventionally written in Nastaliq calligraphy style of the Perso-Arabic script and draws vocabulary more heavily from Persian and Arabic, while Standard Hindi is conventionally written in Devanāgarī and draws vocabulary from Sanskrit comparatively more heavily.Most linguists nonetheless consider Urdu and Hindi to be two standardized forms of the same language; however, others classify them separately due to sociolinguistic differences.

Computer speech synthesis software for education

Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal language text into speech.

Most of the text-to-speech software can read text-based files with natural voices using various voice engines. The text-to-speech voice engine on Vista is Microsoft Anna, and Microsoft Sam on the Windows XP. Vista users can hear a very clear voice of Anna, and the voice quality of Microsoft Anna is much better than that of Microsoft Sam.

The speech synthesis Windows program called narrator has been shipped with Windows2000, Windows XP and Vista. It reads text files and converts speech into wave and mp3 files, users can import generated audio files to portable devices, and listen to them while walking, jogging or commuting to work.

Speech synthesis has been a vital assistive technology tool and its application in this area is significant and widespread, now commonly used by people with dyslexia and other reading difficulties as well as by pre-literate youngsters. Meanwhile, speech synthesis applications and gadgets are language learning tools.

Speech synthesis techniques are now also used in entertainment productions such as games, anime and similar, and widely used in telecommunication products too.