Roman Urdu ( ur, ) is the name used for the

Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
'' Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern I ...

, also known as the Roman script. According to the Urdu scholar Habib R. Sulemani: "Roman Urdu is strongly opposed by the traditional Arabic script lovers. Despite this opposition it is still used by most on the internet and computers due to limitations of most technologies as they do not have the Urdu script. Although, this script is under development and thus the net users are using the Roman script in their own ways. Popular websites like

Jang Group Jang Media Group (), also known as Geo Group, is a Pakistani media conglomerate and a subsidiary of Dubai-based company Independent Media Corporation. Its headquarters is in Printing House, Karachi, Pakistan. It is Pakistan's largest group of new ...

have devised their own schemes for Roman Urdu. This is of great advantage for those who are not able to read the Arabic script. MSN, Yahoo and some desi-chat-rooms are working as laboratories for the evolving new script and language (Roman Urdu)." Romanized Urdu is mutually intelligible with Romanized Hindi in informal contexts, unlike Urdu written in the Urdu alphabet and Hindi in

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ...

. Multinational corporations often use it as a cost effective method for printing and advertising in order to market their products in both Pakistan and India. Although the idea of romanising Urdu had been suggested several times, it was General Ayub Khan who most seriously suggested adopting the Latin alphabet for Urdu and all Pakistani languages during his rule of the country. The suggestion was inspired to an extent by Atatürk's adoption of the Latin alphabet for Turkish in

Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with a small portion on the Balkan Peninsula in ...

. In India, where the Devanagari script is used, Roman Urdu was widely used in the

Indian Army The Indian Army is the land-based branch and the largest component of the Indian Armed Forces. The President of India is the Supreme Commander of the Indian Army, and its professional head is the Chief of Army Staff (COAS), who is a four- ...

, as well as in Christian mission schools, especially for translations of the Bible. The Hunterian transliteration system mostly avoids diacritics and non-standard characters.

Sample texts

Zabu'r 23 ''Dáúd ká Mazmúr''

Roman Urdu

¹Khudáwand merá chaupán hai; mujhe kamí na hogí.
²Wuh mujhe harí harí charágáhoṉ meṉ bithátá hai: Wuh mujhe ráhat ke chashmoṉ ke pás le játá hai.
³Wuh merí ján bahál kartá hai: Wuh mujhe apne nám kí khátir sadáqat kí ráhon par le chaltá hai.
⁴Balki khwáh maut ke sáye kí wádí meṉ se merá guzar ho, Maiṉ kisí balá se nahíṉ darúṉgá; kyúnkṉki tú mere sáth hai: Tere 'asá aur terí láthí se mujhe tasallí hai.
⁵Tú mere dushmanoṉ ke rúbarú mere áge dastarkhwán bichhátá hai: Tú ne mere sir par tel malá hai, merá piyála labrez hotá hai.
⁶Yaqínan bhalái aur rahmat 'umr bhar mere sáth sáth raheṉgí: Aur maiṉ hamesha Khudáwand ke ghar meṉ sukúnat karúṉgá. ( Kita'b I Muqaddas: Zabu'r 23 az Dáúd)

Nastaʿlīq (Perso-Arabic) Script

Devanāgarī script

^१
^२
^३
^४
^५
^६ ( २३ )

Usage

Christian community in the Indian subcontinent

Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
'' Karachi Karachi (; ur, ; ; ) is the most populous city in Pakistan and 12th most populous city in the world, with a population of over 20 million. It is situated at the southern tip of the country along the Arabian Sea coast. It is the former c ...

Uttar Pradesh Uttar Pradesh (; , 'Northern Province') is a state in northern India. With over 200 million inhabitants, it is the most populated state in India as well as the most populous country subdivision in the world. It was established in 1950 ...

, and

Rajasthan Rajasthan (; lit. 'Land of Kings') is a state in northern India. It covers or 10.4 per cent of India's total geographical area. It is the largest Indian state by area and the seventh largest by population. It is on India's northwestern s ...

in the 20th century and is still used today by some people in these states. Pakistani and Indian Christians often used the Roman script for writing Urdu. The Bible Society of India publishes Roman Urdu

Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts ...

s, which enjoyed sale late into the 1960s (though they are still published today). Church songbooks are also common in Roman Urdu. However, its usage in Christian contexts is declining in India with the wider use of

Hindi Hindi ( Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...

and English in the states.

Film industry

Bollywood Hindi cinema, popularly known as Bollywood and formerly as Bombay cinema, refers to the film industry based in Mumbai, engaged in production of motion pictures in Hindi language. The popular term Bollywood, is a portmanteau of "Bombay" (fo ...

, India's major film industry, uses a version of Roman script as the main script for its film titles. This is because Bollywood films have an appeal for viewers across

South Asia South Asia is the southern subregion of Asia, which is defined in both geographical Geography (from Greek: , ''geographia''. Combination of Greek words ‘Geo’ (The Earth) and ‘Graphien’ (to describe), literally "earth descr ...

and even in the

Middle East The Middle East ( ar, الشرق الأوسط, ISO 233: ) is a geopolitical region commonly encompassing Arabia (including the Arabian Peninsula and Bahrain), Asia Minor (Asian part of Turkey except Hatay Province), East Thrace (Europ ...

. The

Devanāgarī Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ...

script is used mostly by Hindi speakers while the Perso-Arabic script is used primarily by Urdu speakers. The language used in Bollywood films is often called Hindi, but most dialogues are actually written in Hindustani—they can be understood by Urdu and Hindi speakers alike. Because the film industry wants to reach the largest possible audience, just using the

or Perso-Arabic script would be unfavorable for the Bollywood industry as few individuals are literate in both scripts. For this reason, the neutral Roman script is used for

film titles, though some films include the Hindi and Urdu scripts as well. The similar circumstances are also applied with Pakistan's Lollywood filming industry, where, along with the Urdu name or title of the movie, a Roman Urdu title is always provided for viewers.

Internet

Roman Urdu used on the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

is non standard and has irregular spelling. Users who use Roman Urdu on the Internet try to imitate

English orthography English orthography is the writing system used to represent spoken English, allowing readers to connect the graphemes to sound and to meaning. It includes English's norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and ...

. In most cases they are unaware of the fact that English spelling is not always phonetic.

Romanization schemes

There are several Romanization standards for writing

Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
'' Uddin and Begum Urdu-Hindustani Romanization,

ALA-LC romanization ALA-LC (American Library AssociationLibrary of Congress) is a set of standards for romanization, the representation of text in other writing systems using the Latin script. Applications The system is used to represent bibliographic information by ...

and ArabTeX. There are two main problems with existing Roman Urdu schemes. Either they are not reversible to

Urdu script The Urdu alphabet (), is the right-to-left alphabet used for Urdu. It is a modification of the Persian script, which is itself a derivative of the Arabic script. The Urdu alphabet has up to 39 or 40 distinct letters with no distinct letter c ...

or they don't allow pronouncing the Urdu words properly. Another shortcoming is that a lot of Roman Urdu schemes confuse the Urdu letter 'Choti He' which has the sound of

voiceless glottal fricative The voiceless glottal fricative, sometimes called voiceless glottal transition, and sometimes called the aspirate, is a type of sound used in some spoken languages that patterns like a fricative or approximant consonant '' phonologically'', b ...

with 'Do Chasham He' which is used as a digraph for

aspirated consonant In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with t ...

s in Urdu script. The digraphs "Sh" for letter Shin and "Zh" for letter Zhe also cause problems as they could be interpreted as the letter Sin and 'Choti He' or letter Ze and 'Choti He' respectively. Most Roman Urdu schemes also do not take much consideration of Urdu orthography and the spelling system.

Informal Roman Urdu

The system of Romanisation used most often by native speakers differs from the formal systems presented in most English language sources. It contains no diacritics or special characters, usually just the 26 letters of the core English alphabet. Informal Romanised Urdu is mutually intelligible with Romanised Hindi and the distinction between the languages can be

controversial Controversy is a state of prolonged public dispute or debate, usually concerning a matter of conflicting opinion or point of view. The word was coined from the Latin ''controversia'', as a composite of ''controversus'' – "turned in an opposite d ...

. While the Urdu alphabet is derived from the Arabic alphabet informal Romanised Urdu is less eccentric than informal Romanised Arabic. Informal Romanised Urdu does not use numerals, and rarely uses mixed case, because the Arabic letters that lack a clear equivalent in the English Latin alphabet (e.g. ) are often silent in Urdu or pronounced identically to other letters (e.g. ). So, this system of Urdu Romanisation is used in some slightly more formal contexts than informal Romanised Arabic. One example is the word "aurat". Formal transliterations often include a punctuation mark (') or special character () for the ayn but this is omitted by Urdu speakers such as in the context of the Aurat March ur, on International Women's Day. Adding the special characters makes it harder to type and would cause things such as twitter hashtags to break. The discussion on social media about these events is often in informal Romanised Urdu, with frequent

code-switching In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation or situation. Code-switching is different from plurilingualis ...

between Urdu and English, but the handwritten or expertly typeset signs at the events are mostly in either English, Urdu in the traditional script, or local languages. Urdu Alphabet Sheet

Footnotes

Bibliography

* Dua, Hans R. (1994b). ''Urdu''. In Asher (Ed.) (pp. 4863–4864). * Insha, Ibn e. (2002) ''Urdu Ki Aakhri Kitab''. New Delhi: Kitab Wala. . * B.S.I. ''Kita'b I Muqaddas''. Bangalore: The Bible Society of India, 1994. . * Gupta, Sunil (2022). ''The Dictionary of Urdu Poetry''. Gurgaon: Zorba Books. .

External links

The Urdu Latin alphabet
by Adnaan Mahmood {{Romanization Christianity in Pakistan Christianity in India Hindustani orthography Urdu Romanization of Arabic