Abstract
The multi-layered historical contacts between Arabic & Urdu resulted in multidimensional off-shoots: lexical and semantic borrowing, acculturation, literacy influence and over-all linguistic impact have been the most prominent areas. The proposed article discusses some characteristics of the Urdu language related to borrowing and then sets out to analyse the Arabic borrowed vocabulary that have been assimilated in Urdu as legal terminology. The analysed vocabulary falls in six categories indicating the manners by which these borrowed words & phrases have evolved as legal terms in Urdu language. The most important categories include pure Arabic lexical items, Arabic phrases, Urduaized Arabic lexical items, Arabic words with Urdu suffixes & prefixes and Arabic words combined with the words of languages other than Urdu. The article, in addition to the conclusions, deciphers an important area of research that needs be further explored and researched with the latest tools provided by Linguistics, Translation Studies and Terminography.