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Roman Urdu

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Not to be confused with Urdish.

Roman Urdu is the name used for the Urdu language written with the Latin script, also known as 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 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)."[1]

Romanized Urdu is mutually intelligible with Romanized Hindi in informal contexts, unlike Urdu written in the Urdu alphabet and Hindi in Devanagari. 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.[2][3][4] The suggestion was inspired to an extent by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's adoption of the Latin alphabet for Turkish in Turkey.

In India, where the Devanagari script is used, Roman Urdu was widely used in the Indian Army, as well as in Christian mission schools, especially for translations of the Bible.[5]

The Hunterian transliteration system mostly avoids diacritics and non-standard characters.

  1. ^ "1 - Number One News Resource of Pakistan - The News - Jang Group". 1 March 2004. Archived from the original on 1 March 2004. Retrieved 27 September 2022.
  2. ^ Paving new paths to romanise Urdu script, Mushir Anwar, Dawn (newspaper), Nov 27, 2008
  3. ^ The Urdu-English Controversy in Pakistan, Tariq Rahman, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Feb., 1997), pp. 177-207
  4. ^ The Language Movement: An Outline Archived 2012-11-19 at the Wayback Machine, Rafiqul Islam
  5. ^ Fārūqī, Shamsurraḥmān (2001). Early Urdu Literary Culture and History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195652017.

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