User:Irtapil/Urdu alphabet 1

Urdu alphabet

= refs and resources =

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 * when adding sections to the main article remember to use In use
 * hamza
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 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Accessibility/Data_tables_tutorial
 * empty headers are accessibility errors

related pages

 * Hindustani_phonology
 * Urdu

Word divider
00:04, 18 May 2020 (UTC)'' The Nastaʿlīq form of Islamic calligraphy uses vertical arrangement to separate words. The beginning of each word is written higher than the end of the preceding word, so that a line of text takes on a sawtooth appearance. Nastaliq spread from Persia and today is used for Persian, Uyghur, Pashto, and Urdu.''

on line resources

 * National Language Promotion Department - Pakistan
 * National Council for Promotion of Urdu Language - India
 * https://www.urducouncil.nic.in/
 * https://tech.cle.org.pk/
 * https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-in-society/article/urdu-in-devanagari-shifting-orthographic-practices-and-muslim-identity-in-delhi/F89F162B15A6720008639E627D6F0242
 * https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231786143_Urdu_in_Devanagari_Shifting_orthographic_practices_and_Muslim_identity_in_Delhi
 * google book
 * exerpt of Views from Inside: Languages, Cultures, and Schooling for K?12 Educators ($80 for book)
 * book details
 * ref from book details:
 * ref generated from exerpt
 * the BBC article i fount that book via http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/other/urdu/guide/alphabet.shtm

Formatted Reference List
= Draft content for the Urdu alphabet page =

intro
The Urdu alphabet ( simplified script: اردو حروف تہجی, pronunciation: Urdu harūf tahajī, or  Urdu tahajī) is the right-to-left alphabet used for the Urdu language. It is a modification of the Persian alphabet, which is itself a derivative of the Arabic alphabet. The Urdu alphabet has 39 or 40 letters plus digraphs. The Urdu alphabet has no distinct letter cases, is typically written in the calligraphic Nastaliq script, whereas Arabic is more commonly in the Naskh style.

Usually, bare transliterations of Urdu into Roman letters (called Roman Urdu) omit many phonemic elements that have no equivalent in English or other languages commonly written in the Latin script. The National Language Authority of Pakistan has developed a number of systems with specific notations to signify non-English sounds, but these can only be properly read by someone already familiar with the loan letters.

The standard Urdu script is a modified version of the Perso-Arabic script and has its origins in 13th century Iran. It is closely related to the development of the Nastaliq style of Perso-Arabic script. Urdu script in its extended form is known as Shahmukhi script and is used for writing other Indo-Aryan languages of North Indian subcontinent like Punjabi and Saraiki as well.

Urdu and Hindi are mutually intelligible as spoken languages, or when written in the Latin alphabet. The most obvious distinction between Hindi and Urdu is the script. Both scripts have religious connotations.

,

Geographic distribution
In addition to Pakistan, the Urdu language is official in five states of India: Bihar, Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh.

Other than the Indian subcontinent, the Urdu script is also used by Pakistan's large diaspora, including in the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and other places.

Many Urdu speakers living outside of Pakistan use the Latin alphabet to write Urdu do to limited availability of software for writing Urdu.

Nastaliq


Urdu is written in the Nastaliq style ( Nastaʿlīq). The Nastaliq calligraphic writing style began as a Persian mixture of the Naskh and Ta'liq scripts. After the Mughal conquest, Nastaliq became the preferred writing style for Urdu. It is the dominant style in Pakistan, and many Urdu writers elsewhere in the world use it. Nastaʿlīq is more cursive and flowing than its Naskh counterpart.

In the Arabic alphabet, and many others derived from it, letters are regarded as having two or three general forms each, based on their position in the word (though obviously Arabic calligraphy can add a great deal of complexity). But the Nastaliq style in which Urdu is written uses more than three general forms for many letters, even for simple non-decorative documents.



currently in Urdu Alphabet
The Urdu script is an abjad script derived from Perso-Arabic script, which is itself a derivative of the Arabic script. As an abjad, the Urdu script only shows consonants and long vowels; short vowels can only be inferred by the consonants' relation to each other. While this type of script is convenient in Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew, whose consonant roots are the key of the sentence, Urdu is an Indo-European language, which does not have the same luxury, hence necessitating more memorisation. The number of letters in the Urdu alphabet is somewhat ambiguous and debated.

messy version
The Urdu script is an abjad script derived from Perso-Arabic script, which is itself a derivative of the Arabic script. The Urdu alphabet was standardized in 2004 by the National Language Authority, which is responsible for standardizing Urdu in Pakistan. According to the National Language Authority, Urdu has 58 letters of which 39 are basic letters while 18 are digraphs to represent aspirated consonants made by attaching basic consonant letters with a variant of He called do chashmi he. Tāʼ marbūṭah is also sometimes considered a letter though it is rarely used except for in certain loan words from Arabic.

The Urdu script is an abjad script derived from Perso-Arabic script, which is itself a derivative of the Arabic script.

The number of letters is somewhat ambiguous and debated.

Urdu has 39 individual letters,

while 18 digraphs to represent aspirated consonants made by attaching basic consonant letters with a variant of He called do chashmi he, for a total of 58.

Tāʼ marbūṭah is also sometimes considered a letter though it is rarely used except for in certain loan words from Arabic.

As an abjad, the Urdu script only shows consonants and long vowels; short vowels can only be inferred by the consonants' relation to each other. While this type of script is convenient in Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew, whose consonant roots are the key of the sentence, Urdu is an Indo-European language, which does not have the same luxury, hence necessitating more memorization.

As an abjad, the Urdu script only shows consonants and long vowels; short vowels can only be inferred by the consonants' relation to each other. While this type of script is convenient in Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew, whose consonant roots are the key of the sentence, Urdu is an Indo-European language, which does not have the same luxury, hence necessitating more memorization. Urdu uses the vowels represented as full letters ا و ی ے more often than Arabic; there are fewer short vowels to omit. Also, Hamza ئ and the mada on Alif Mada آ are not omitted. Words in Urdu that differ only by ommitted short vowels are rarer in Urdu than Arabic, but the meanings are often far more divergent than Arabic words with the same root.

Letter Names and Phonemes

 * The number of letters in the Urdu alphabet is more ambiguous than the 26 in the English alphabet, the most commonly quoted numbers are 39 or 40 letters.
 * The usual letter forms in Urdu Nastaliq are somewhat more diverse than for most Arabic-derived alphabets, see  "letter forms" below.

core alphabet
(see also: Encoding Urdu in Unicode below) See below for written vowels

table

 * version at Urdu_alphabet

Letter names and phonemes

 * Footnotes:


 * Alternate Romanisations:

Footnotes for letter names and phonemes:
This may display in a different style if you do not have a Nastaliq font installed. . Footnote: where two styles are shown, the style on the right is a Naskh or modern Arabic style.

Some sets of Urdu letters have matching sounds.
 * 4 letters ز ذ ض ظ are all ≈ Z  These excess diacritics do not reflect any significant difference in pronunciation between the letters ذ ز ض ظ all shown as "z" in other systems.
 * 3 letters س ص ث are all ≈ S
 * 2 letters ت ط are both ≈ T (a third letter ٹ is also often shown as English T, but is different to the other two Urdu letters, see  below.)
 * 2 letters ہ ح are both ≈ H but are sometimes regarded s distinct.

In Urdu, hamza ء is silent in all its forms except for when it is used as hamza-e-izafat. The main use of hamza ء in Urdu is to indicate a vowel cluster. Sometimes transliterated as "2" in informal Arabic but not in Urdu

In Urdu words, Hamza ء is always attached ئ to a form resembling the Arabic ى alef maksura. Some fonts convert an isolated Hamza in this form to Hamza on the line.

Ayn ع in its initial عـ and final ـع position is usually silent in pronunciation and is replaced by the sound of its preceding or succeeding vowel. When it appears in the middle of a word there are a few different, similar looking, characters used to represent it in the Latin alphabet: (`) the grave accent, (‘) the left single quotation mark, (') the apostrophe, or the Pacific okina, or it can be pronounced like Arabic hamza  and be transliterated as equivalent marks in the reverse direction such as (’) the right single quotation mark. Sometimes transliterated as "3" in informal Arabic but not in Urdu.

see also: below.

Gol He and do-cashmi-he diverged from the Arabic letter Hā, sometimes choti hey is used too refer to gol hey, while sometimes choti he refers to the Arabic version. The distinction is somewhat artificial, since gol he is an equivalent letter to the Arabic letter, but they have separate unicode characters. Some fonts make the Arabic hé look the same as gol hey or do-cashmi hé.

The consonant pronunciation of depends on the speaker's regional accent.

Vowel chart
Urdu does not have standalone vowel letters as a characteristic of abjads called mater lectionis. Short vowels (a, i, u), which do not occur word-finally, are represented by optional diacritics (zabar, zer, pesh) upon the preceding consonant or a placeholder consonant (alif, ain, or hamza) if the syllable begins with the vowel, and long vowels by consonants alif, ain, ye, and wa'o, with disambiguating diacritics, some of which are optional (zabar, zer, pesh), whereas some are not (madd, hamza). This is a table of Urdu vowels:

Arabic Tāʼ marbūṭah
Tāʼ marbūṭah is also sometimes considered the 40th letter of the Urdu alphabet, though it is rarely used except for in certain loan words from Arabic. Tāʼ marbūṭah is regarded as a form of tā, the Arabic version of Urdu tē, But it is not pronounced as such, and when replaced with an Urdu letter in naturalised loan words it is usually replaced with Gol hē.

Table

 * Footnotes:

Hamza in Nastaliq
Hamza can be difficult to recognise in Urdu handwriting and fonts designed to replicate it, closely resembling two dots above as featured in ت Té and ق Qaf, whereas in Arabic and Geometric fonts it is more distinct and closely resembles the western form of the numeral 2 two.

Vowels
The Urdu language has a total of 10 vowels: 3 short, 5 long and 2 diphthongal. Like in its parent Arabic alphabet, Urdu vowels are represented using a combination of digraphs and diacritics. Alif, Wāʾo, Ye, He and their variants are used to represent vowels.

Alif
Alif, the first letter of the Urdu alphabet, is a glottal stop consonant but is exclusively used as a vowel except in the syllable-initial position where it alone rather functions as a placeholder for syllable-initial short vowels, for example, ab,  ism,  uṛ. As a vowel, it represents the long "a", for example, bhāgnā but when it follows another alif it takes the form of a tilde-like diacritic called madd on top of that alif, for example,  āp.

Waʾo
Wāʾo is used, as a consonant/semivowel, for "w" and its allophonic development, the labiodental approximant, and, as a vowel, for long "u" , long "o"  and the monophthongized diphthong "au". However, when preceded by a k͟he, wāʾo sometimes renders the short "u" , for example, in k͟hud.

Ye and Bari ye
Ye has a variant called baṛī ye ("greater ye") for which the regular Perso-Arabic ye is called choṭī ye ("lesser ye"), which is used, as a consonant/semivowel, for "y"  and, as a vowel, for long "i", long "e"  and the monophthongized diphthong "ai".

Baṛī ye is however used to render the word-final long "e" and "ai" especially to distinguish prepositions and other single syllable words. Baṛī ye is never used as a consonant.

Nasal Nun
Vowel nasalization is indicated by placing a nūn after the vowel and removing the supralinear dot ( , always in word-final position) or placing a V-shaped or U-shaped diacritic called maghnoona or ulta jazm on top. This is known as nūn g͟hunnā or nūn-e-g͟hunnā ("nūn of nasalization"). For example, the nasalized form of the word (hai, /ɦɛː/) is written  (ha͠i, /ɦɛ̃ː/). Word-medially it is also present for the homorganic nasalization in digraphs with velar and retroflex consonants, such as in (ṭāṅg, /ʈɑːŋɡ/) or  (ghaṇṭā, /ɡʱəɳʈɑː/), where the maghnoona or ulta jazm is often ignored unless disambiguation is necessary (as with Arabic-script diacritics in general).

Vowel Diacritics
Urdu uses the same subset of diacritics used in Arabic based on Persian conventions. Urdu also uses Persian names of the diacritics instead of Arabic names. Commonly used diacritics are zabar (Arabic fatḥah), zer (Arabic kasrah), pesh (Arabic dammah) which are used to clarify the pronunciation of vowels, as shown above. Jazam (, Arabic sukun) is used to indicate a consonant cluster and tashdid (, Arabic shaddah) is used to indicate a gemination, although it is never used for verbs, which require double consonants to be spelled out separately. Other diacritics include khari zabar (Arabic dagger alif), do zabar (Arabic fathatan) which are found in some common Arabic loan words. Other Arabic diacritics are also sometimes used though very rarely in loan words from Arabic. Zer-e-izafat and hamzah-e-izafat are described in the next section.

Other than common diacritics, Urdu also has special diacritics, which are often found only in dictionaries for the clarification of irregular pronunciation. These diacritics include kasrah-e-majhool, fathah-e-majhool, dammah-e-majhool, maghnoona, ulta jazam, alif-e-wavi and some other very rare diacritics. Among these, only maghnoona is used commonly in dictionaries and has a Unicode representation at U+0658. Other diacritics are only rarely written in printed form, mainly in some advanced dictionaries.

The two He's
He has two variants: gol he ("round he") and do-cashmī he ("two-eyed he").

Gol he is the primary letter for the "h"  sound but word-finally is pronounced as a long "a" or "e" ( or ).

Do-cashmī he, which is written as a looped medial or initial hāʾ, is used to orthographically produce aspiration and breathy voice and sometimes to write Arabic words.

Gol He and do-cashmi-he diverged from the Arabic letter he, sometimes choti hey is used too refer to gol hey, while sometimes choti he refers to the Arabic version. The distinction is somewhat artificial, since gol he is an equivalent letter to the Arabic letter, but they have separate unicode characters. Some fonts make the Arabic he look the same as gol hey or do-cashmi he.

depictions of hey
Footnotes:
 * This may display in different fonts to those listed if you do not have Arial, Tahoma, and a Nastaliq font installed.
 * Nasta'liq is the style used for almost everything written in Urdu, from official documents to web memes. This will only display in Nastaliq if you have a Nastaliq font installed on your system, such as Urdu Typesetting (on Windows), Google's Noto Nastaliq Urdu, or SIL International's Awami Nastaliq.
 * Arial is a font commonly used for Arabic, but it also includes the Urdu letters.
 * Tahoma has an extensive and distinctive Arabic character set, particularly for Hey.

Aspirated and breathy voiced consonants
Hindi has a very similar phonology to Urdu and they share a lot of vocabulary. Hindi is traditionally written in the Devanagari script. This script is also used to Urdu, particularly when seeking a wider audience for Urdu writing.

Devanagari has a very different way of Representing the aspirated consonants.

Footnotes:
. The Devanagari equivalents all add a schwa vowel to the IPA.

. In most cases aspirated digraphs have a single devanagari character in Hindi, but on rare occasions ह is used.

This ligature is much mote prominent in Arabic styles than it is in Urdu's usual Nastaliq.

= omniglot urdu
= https://www.omniglot.com/writing/urdu.htm

bʰ بھ [bʱ] pʰ پھ [pʰ] tʰ تھ [tʰ] ṭʰ ٹھ [ʈʰ] jʰ جھ [dʒʱ] cʰ چھ [tʃʰ] dʰ دھ [dʱ] ḍʰ ڈھ [ɖʱ] rʰ رھ [rʱ] ṛʰe ڑھ [ɽʱ] kʰ کھ [kʰ] gʰ گھ [gʱ] lʰ لھ [lʱ] mʰ مھ [mʱ] nʰ نھ [nʱ]

= github
= IPA - Transliterate - LOC

d̪ʱ dʰ dh

IPA - Transliterate - LOC

ʈʰ ʈʰ ṭh

IPA - Transliterate - LOC

ɖʱ ɖʰ ḍh

IPA - Transliterate - LOC

kʰ kʰ kh

IPA - Transliterate - LOC

ɡʱ gʰ gh

IPA - Transliterate - LOC

t͡ʃʰ čʰ ch

IPA - Transliterate - LOC

hʱ ـه ʰ hh

IPA - Transliterate - LOC

mʱ mʰ mh

IPA - Transliterate - LOC

nʱ nʰ  nh

ɽʱ ɽʰ ṛh

= "Beyond Simple Transliteration"
=

= digraphs
=

ख KHA Kaaf-Hay

घ GHA Gaaf-Hay

छ CHA Chay-Hay

झ JHA Jeem-Hay

ठ TTHA Ttay-Hay

ढ DDHA Ddaal-Hay

थ THA Tay-Hay

ध DHA Daal-Hay

फ PHA Pay-Hay

भ BHA Bay-Hay

Iẓāfat
Iẓāfat is a syntactical construction of two nouns, where the first component is a determined noun, and the second is a determiner. This construction was borrowed from Persian. A short vowel "i" is used to connect these two words, and when pronouncing the newly-formed word the short vowel is connected to the first word. If the first word ends in a consonant or an ʿain, it may be written as zer at the end of the first word, but usually is not written at all. If the first word ends in choṭī he or ye ( or ) then hamzā  is used above the last letter ( or  or ). If the first word ends in a long vowel ( or ), then baṛī ye with hamzā on top  is added at the end of the first word.

Differences from the Persian alphabet
Urdu has more letters added to the Persian base to represent sounds not present in Persian, which already has additional letters added to the Arabic base itself to represent sounds not present in Arabic. The letters added include:
 * ṭē to represent voiceless retroflex stop
 * ḍāl to represent voiced retroflex stop
 * ṛē to represent retroflex flap
 * nūn-e ğunnah to represent nasal vowel
 * a separate do-cashmi-hē letter exists to denote a aspirated consonant  or a murmured voice . This letter is mainly used as part of the multitude of digraphs, detailed below.
 * and baṛī yē is used to represent a  long open-mid front unrounded vowel  or a  long close-mid front unrounded vowel  at the end of a word, is a derivative of Persian letter yē ی یـ ـیـ ـی - which in Urdu is called čhōṭī yē. (The Persian and Urdu versions differ from the  Arabic version يـ ـيـ ـي ي by omitting the dots in the final and isolated forms.)

Retroflex letters
Old Hindustani used four dots over three Arabic letters to represent retroflex consonants: ٿ, ڐ and ڙ. In handwriting those dots was often written like a small vertical line attached to a small triangle. Subsequently, this shape became identical to a small letter. (It is commonly and erroneously assumed that ṭāʾ itself was used to indicate retroflex consonants because of its being an emphatic alveolar consonant that Arabic scribes thought approximated the Hindustani retroflexes. In modern Urdu, called to'e is always pronounced as a dental, not a retroflex.

Retroflex distinction when converting to and from the Latin alphabet
Conversion between the Urdu and English alphabets does not work the same way in both directions. In English when converting Urdu script to the Latin alphabet, the letters and  are often shown as "d" and "t", respectively. In the international phonetic alphabet, the most precise depiction of these letters is and  but even then they are often simplified to  and. Whereas in the reverse direction, the corresponding retroflexed versions of these letters and  are the letters most often used for "d" and "t" in European loan words and transliterations of proper nouns. These letters are rarer in Urdu, to the that where European loan words like (doctor) and (tomato) are often the examples given when teaching Children the Urdu alphabet.

rare letter combination in Urdu. English R varies by dialect.

Comparison to Hindi Devanagari and Arabic
Urdu and Hindi are mostly mutually intelligible, to the point that they are sometimes considered to be one language, but this distinction is controversial (Hindi Urdu controversy). One of the biggest differences is the script; Hindi is usually written in Devanagari. Transliteration between the two scripts is neither simple nor unambiguous. There are many cases where one character in Devanagari Hindi corresponds to multiple redundant characters in Persianised Urdu or vice versa (see table below). in many of these cases the letters had different pronunciations in Arabic, from which the Urdu alphabet is derived (via the Persian alphabet). For example, the letters representing the emphatic consonants from Arabic, ط and ص are pronounced the same way as the corresponding non-emphatic consonants ت and س in Urdu. Though, when pronouncing Arabic words, particularly in a religious context, native speakers of Urdu go to great effort to pronounce the Arabic sounds unambiguously.

current version from urdu alphabet
g

= Beyond Simple Transliteration
=

न NA Noon

ण NNA

ञ NYA

ङ NGA Noon

क KA Kaaf

ख KHA Kaaf-Hay

ग GA Gaaf

घ GHA Gaaf-Hay

ङ NGA Noon

च CA Chay

छ CHA Chay-Hay

ज JA Jeem

झ JHA Jeem-Hay

ञ NYA

ट TTA Ttay

ठ TTHA Ttay-Hay

ड DDA Ddaal

ढ DDHA Ddaal-Hay

ण NNA

त TA Tay/ Toay

थ THA Tay-Hay

द DA Daal

ध DHA Daal-Hay

न NA Noon

प PA Pay

फ PHA Pay-Hay

ब BA Bay

भ BHA Bay-Hay

म MA Meem

य YA Bari-Yeh

र RA Ray

ल LA Laam

व VA Wow

श SHA Sheen

ष SSA Sheen

स SA Seen/ Saay/ Suad

ह HA b Hay

other alphabets
क KA Kaaf

ख KHA Kaaf-Hay

ग GA Gaaf

घ GHA Gaaf-Hay

ङ NGA Noon

च CA Chay

छ CHA Chay-Hay

ज JA Jeem

झ JHA Jeem-Hay

ञ NYA

ट TTA Ttay

ठ TTHA Ttay-Hay

ड DDA Ddaal

ढ DDHA Ddaal-Hay

ण NNA

त TA Tay/ Toay

थ THA Tay-Hay

द DA Daal

ध DHA Daal-Hay

न NA Noon

प PA Pay

फ PHA Pay-Hay

ब BA Bay

भ BHA Bay-Hay

म MA Meem

य YA Bari-Yeh

र RA Ray

ल LA Laam

व VA Wow

श SHA Sheen

ष SSA Sheen

स SA Seen/ Saay/ Suad

ह HA Ha

Romanization standards and systems


There are several romanization standards for writing Urdu with the Latin alphabet, though they are not very popular because most fall short of representing the Urdu language properly. Instead of standard romanization schemes, people on Internet, mobile phones and media often use a non-standard form of romanization which tries to mimic English orthography. The problem with this kind of romanization is that it can only be read by native speakers, and even for them with great difficulty. Among standardized romanization schemes, the most accurate is ALA-LC romanization, which is also supported by National Language Authority. Other romanization schemes are often rejected because either they are unable to represent sounds in Urdu properly, or they often do not take regard of Urdu orthography, and favor pronunciation over orthography.

Roman Urdu also holds significance among the Christians of Pakistan and North India. Urdu was the dominant native language among Christians of Karachi and Lahore in present-day Pakistan and Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh Rajasthan in India, during the early part of the 19th and 20th century, and is still used by Christians in these places. Pakistani and Indian Christians often used the Roman script for writing Urdu. Thus Roman Urdu was a common way of writing among Pakistani and Indian Christians in these areas up to the 1960s. The Bible Society of India publishes Roman Urdū Bibles that enjoyed sale late into the 1960s (though they are still published today). Church songbooks are also common in Roman Urdu. However, the usage of Roman Urdu is declining with the wider use of Hindi and English in these states.

Computers and the Urdu alphabet
In the early days of computers, Urdu was not properly represented on any code page. One of the earliest code pages to represent Urdu was IBM Code Page 868 which dates back to 1990. Other early code pages which represented Urdu alphabets were Windows-1256 and MacArabic encoding both of which date back to the mid 1990s. In Unicode, Urdu is represented inside the Arabic block. Another code page for Urdu, which is used in India, is Perso-Arabic Script Code for Information Interchange. In Pakistan, the 8-bit code page which is developed by National Language Authority is called Urdu Zabta Takhti (UZT) which represents Urdu in its most complete form including some of its specialized diacritics, though UZT is not designed to coexist with the Latin alphabet.

Encoding Urdu in Unicode
Like other writing systems derived from the Arabic script, Urdu uses the 0600–06FF Unicode range. Certain glyphs in this range appear visually similar (or identical when presented using particular fonts) even though the underlying encoding is different. This presents problems for information storage and retrieval. For example, the University of Chicago's electronic copy of John Shakespear's "A Dictionary, Hindustani, and English" includes the word '' (India). Searching for the string "" returns no results, whereas querying with the (identical-looking in many fonts) string "" returns the correct entry. This is because the medial form of the Urdu letter do chashmi he (U+06BE)—used to form aspirate digraphs in Urdu—is visually identical in its medial form to the Arabic letter ه|hāʾ (U+0647; phonetic value ). In Urdu, the phoneme is represented by the character U+06C1, called gol he - round he, or chhoti he - small he (see also: "" above).

In 2003, the Center for Research in Urdu Language Processing (CRULP) —a research organisation affiliated with Pakistan's National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences—produced a proposal for mapping from the 1-byte UZT encoding of Urdu characters to the Unicode standard. This proposal suggests a preferred Unicode glyph for each character in the Urdu alphabet.

Similar Characters
Footnotes:

N = Nastaliq (This it may not display in Nastaliq style, depending on which fonts are installed locally). Single characters are the isolated form, where two are shown they are the isolated form and end form.

The other positional forms are shown in Naskh only because Nastaliq has more than four positional forms  for many characters, depending on which character they join.

Software
The Daily Jang was the first Urdu newspaper to be typeset digitally in Nastaliq by computer. There are efforts underway to develop more sophisticated and user-friendly Urdu support on computers and on the Internet. Nowadays, nearly all Urdu newspapers, magazines, journals and periodicals are composed on computers via various Urdu software programmes, the most widespread of which is InPage Desktop Publishing package. Microsoft has included Urdu language support in all new versions of Windows and both Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 are available in Urdu through Language Interface Pack support. Most Linux Desktop distributions allow the easy installation of Urdu support and translations as well. Apple implemented the Urdu language keyboard across Mobile devices in its iOS 8 update in September 2014.

Computing and Typesetting
Despite the invention of the Urdu typewriter in 1911, Urdu newspapers continued to publish prints of handwritten scripts by calligraphers known as katibs or khush-navees until the late 1980s. The Pakistani national newspaper Daily Jang was the first Urdu newspaper to use Nastaliq computer-based composition. There are efforts under way to develop more sophisticated and user-friendly Urdu support on computers and the internet. Nowadays, nearly all Urdu newspapers, magazines, journals, and periodicals are composed on computers with Urdu software programs.

Keyboard
The Urdu keyboard is usually available on all major platforms such as Android, iOS and Windows however they can vary for instance Android and iOS devices usually use the phonetics keyboard whereas Windows machines use the UZT machines, although the Phonetics version is also available for Windows. MacOS machines use the same Phonetics keyboard as iOS devices.

Font
As of April 2020, iOS and MacOS are the only platforms to use the Nastaliq font as standard for the Urdu language.

Use of Urdu keyboard layout for other languages
Windows 10 uses the Urdu keyboard for the Arabic script versions of Punjabi and Sindhi languages, despite the Urdu keyboard missing several Sindhi letters - ڪ ڳ ڱ ڦ ٺ ٻ ڀ ڊ ڍ ڌ ڏ ڇ ڄ ڃ ي ڻ ۽ ۾ - and the Urdu versions of - ٹ ڑ - which written as ٿ ڙ in Sindhi.

Variations
idea: instead of colours, just cut this up into slices and put a long skinny image next to each font name.

Footnotes:

These styles may display in different styles, depending on which fonts you have installed on your device. Compare to the image, the first two lines of the image are in Nastaliq  fonts: "Noto Nastaliq Urdu" from Google's Noto fonts collection and  "Urdu Typesetting" from Microsoft.

Simplified geometric font styles are rarely used for Urdu, they are more commonly used for other languages such as Arabic and Farsi, but many of these fonts support the full Urdu alphabet, such as "Baloo Bhaijaan" (yellow font in the image) which was specifically designed for Urdu by the India-based typeface foundry Ek Type, and Microsoft's  "Tahoma".

Naskh styles are usually not a first choice for Urdu publishing, but Naskh fonts are often used where a more characteristic Urdu font is unavailable. Naskh fonts have been available much longer than Nastaliq  fonts, and Naskh  fonts than work better than  Nastaliq  fonts where display sized or processing power are limited, such as on mobile phones or older computers.

Urdu Letter Construction
The i'jam diacritic characters are illustrative only, in most typesetting the combined characters in the middle of the table are used. The characters used to illustrate the consonant diacritics are from Unicode set "Arabic pedagogical symbols".

Skeleton characters that do not appear in the alphabet are "DOTLESS BEH" U+066E, "DOTLESS QAF" U+066F, and "DOTLESS FEH" U+06A1. These are not used in Urdu but we're used historically in very early versions of Arabic writing.

The "Arabic Tatweel Modifier Letter" U+0640 character used to show the positional forms doesn't work in some Nastaliq fonts.

Urdu Choti Yē has 2 dots below in the initial and middle positions only. The standard Arabic version ي يـ ـيـ ـي ]]|undefined always has 2 dots below.

The short vowel diacritics (see below) are usually omitted in Urdu writing, but hamza and madda  are usually included.

Nūn Ghūnna in the middle of a word is often an omitted diacritic.

Endnotes
Some of the Nastaliq text on this page will probably show in a different style if you do not have a Nastaliq font installed. If this نستعلیق and this نستعلیق looks like these four     then you are probably seeing it written in a modern Arabic style.

Distinction from Hindi
There are conflicting points of view about the division between Hindi and Urdu. (Main article: Hindi Urdu controversy.)

Some people hold the view that the distinction is old and intrinsic to the languages. The Urdu language emerged as a distinct register of Hindustani well before the Partition of India. It is distinguished most by its extensive Persian influences. This stands to reason: Persian was the official language of the Mughal government and the most prominent lingua franca of the Indian subcontinent for several centuries before the rise of the Maratha Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Others claim that the difference is recent, and artificial, and more related to extrinsic cultural factors than it is too the language(s) themselves. The two languages are often collectively referred to as " Hindustani", but generally only by outsiders, and term is regarded by some sources as outdated.

Urdu and Hindi, an official federal language of India, are different registers of the same language, and thus they are mutually intelligible and can use each other's script to write the other's language. Usage of script generally signifies the user's faith: Muslims generally use the Urdu (Perso-Arabic) script, while Hindus use the Devanagari script.

In addition to Pakistan, the Urdu script is official in five states of India with a substantial percentage of Hindustani-speaking Muslims: Bihar, Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, Telangana, and Uttar Pradesh.

from Aurat March
= Contributors =

that i've integrated

 * user:Theo.phonchana
 * 38,717 bytes +45‎ →‎Retroflex letters

not integrated
(might not stay comprehensive)
 * 15:37, 9 May 2020‎ Heyday to you talk contribs‎ 38,672 bytes -16‎ (my note: they removed Urdu name from infobox)
 * 09:40, 9 May 2020‎ user:Aditya Mishra H1N1 39,129 bytes -152‎ →‎Ayn: Removed meaningless paragraph
 * 22:08, 8 May 2020‎ 106.79.211.25 39,162 bytes +152‎ →‎Ayn: Alphabet
 * 22:05, 8 May 2020‎ 106.79.211.25 39,010 bytes +112‎ →‎Differences from Persian alphabet: Alphabet

between rollbacks

 * rollback: 02:13 - 4 May 2020
 * 14:19, 3 May 2020‎ Ahmedraunaq 38,273 bytes -117‎
 * rollback: 08:40 - 28 April 2020

users

 * user:Plastikspork
 * user:Ash wki - a fairly extensive contribution (removed the H from the end of a lot of letter names ending in "ah" but i've not restored all of that in the original version because it seems both are acceptable)
 * user:Taimoorahmed11
 * user:Chan-Paton
 * user:Favonian Reverted edits by user:Better Knowledge
 * user:Largoplazo
 * user:Abasit909
 * user:Kbb2
 * user:Largoplazo 38,225 bytes -29‎ Reverted edits by user:1Trevorr
 * user:Malurian123
 * an IP changed three letters 12:02, 16 January 2020
 * user:MB 17:09, 24 February 2020‎ by MB size after 46,844 bytes +73‎  Adding local short description: "Perso-Arabic-based alphabet for Urdu of 39 letters", overriding Wikidata description "Perso-Arabic-based alphabet for Urdu of 39 letters (incl. hamza and nun ghunnah); in addition to the Persian alphabet contains ٹ‎ ڈ‎ ڑ‎ for retroflex consonants, ں‎ for nasalization, ے‎ for /ɛ:/ or /e:/, and ھ‎ for aspiration or murmure" (Shortdesc helper)

edit notes table
= working on it =

from Burushaski: Writing system
Burushaski is a predominantly spoken rather than written language. Occasionally the Urdu alphabet is used,, and there are some specific characters in unicode , but no fixed orthography exists. Adu Wazir Shafi wrote a book Burushaski Razon using a Latin script.

Tibetan sources record a Bru-śa language of the Gilgit valley, which appears to have been Burushaski, whose script was one of five scripts used to write the extinct Zhang-Zhung language. Although Burushaski may once have been a significant literary language, no Bru-śa manuscripts are known to have survived.

Linguists working on Burushaski use various makeshift transcriptions based on the Latin alphabet, most commonly that by Berger (see below), in their publications.