November 17, 2002

The absence of a set of rules for writing Urdu in the Roman script leads to ambiguities. Here is an attempt to device a simple method for doing it right

THE use of English script to write Urdu or Hindi is known as Roman Urdu, and is an old practice. During their occupation of the subcontinent, the British used to insert the local words, in English script, in their English text and expressions. Lately, many English authors of Pakistani and Indian origin (such as Hanif Kureishi) have used Urdu expressions frequently in their novels.

At present, due to advancement in electronic communication via Internet and multimedia, it has become necessary for Urdu-speaking people to communicate their natural feelings and thoughts in English script. Since there are no agreed and established methods and rules for this purpose, every person is using his own version of Roman Urdu. Thus, quite often this situation creates misunderstandings. Presently, we will try to propose some simple rules to be used in Roman script for Urdu writing.

It must be cleared at the outset that this effort has nothing to do with what happened to the Turkish language when, in the 1920s, its Arabic script was supplanted by Latin script. The idea is not at all to dispose of Arabic script for Urdu writing. The purpose and aim of this essay is twofold. Firstly, to try to lay down certain rules for the alphabets in order to obtain a kind of homogeneity, so that for any Urdu word or phrase different variants in English script are avoided. For example, ‘Hakeem Jameel an rahay hayn’ or ‘Hakim Jamil aa rahai hain,’, for ‘Hakeem Jameel is coming’.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, there should be no ambiguity when reading a Roman Urdu text and converting it into Urdu. For example: ‘ghair ka ghar’, which means ‘house of a stranger’. In this phrase, ‘gh’ is used for two different Urdu letters.

Another example should make this point very clear. The word zan in Roman Urdu may mean ‘woman’ or ‘suspicion’ in Urdu, according to two different z-sounding letters in Urdu script (zay in the first case and zoay for the latter).

It must be kept in mind that English alphabets are not the same as that of Urdu. In English, there are only 26 letters while in Urdu there are 38. And if it is considered that furthermore, in Urdu, there are two types for the first letter A, and two types of n, the number of Urdu letters is extended to 40.

English alphabet is composed of five vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and 21 consonants, while in Urdu all letters are consonants. The vowels are used to connect the consonants. To construct an Urdu word, the required consonants are put together and any Urdu-speaking person will know how to pronounce it. But instead of using vowels, the consonants in Urdu are connected through superscript and subscripts. They are like the accents over the vowels as in Latin languages or as in German, such as: à, â, é, è, î, ï, ô, ö, ù, û, ü. An Urdu word jbl will be pronounced as jabal, and srwr will be pronounced as sarwar or suroor depending on its use in the text.

In English, there are two types of letters — small and capital. The capital letters are used to begin a sentence or to write a proper noun. In Urdu, there is no such distinction. This particular difference between the two languages can be used to write the special Urdu letters, by using capital letters in Roman Urdu. Therefore, while writing Urdu in Roman script, we will not start a sentence or a proper noun with a capital letter, as is the case in the Urdu language itself.

Hence, according to this proposition, the Roman Urdu alphabet, corresponding to the Urdu alphabet, will be as follows:

A b p t T c j CH H KH d D Z r R z z’ s SH S

ZD TO ZO A’ GH f q k g l m n w h hh a’ y ey

The corresponding Urdu script letters are given in the Appendix, paragraph 1. It should be noted that in the above, care has been taken to avoid the use of superscript or subscripts, or any sort of diacritical signs, except that of an apostrophe.

In Urdu, hh is a special consonant sounding as h, but when it is attached to a consonant, the consonant and hh are pronounced as a single letter. In Roman Urdu, the same result is obtained with a single h such as in ah. In Urdu, this combination is used as a single letter and all such letters are given below:

bh, ph, th, Th, jh, CHh, dh, Dh, Rh, kh, gh

The Urdu script of these letters is presented in the Appendix.

Vowels: We have already mentioned that the vowels a, e, i, o and u will be used only to make liaison between the consonants. In English and in other European languages, the vowels do not have the same sounds all the time. The vowel ‘a’ has different sounds in ‘bat’, ‘ball’, ‘bail’ and ‘bark’. In Urdu, it will be used as ‘u’ is used in English words ‘but’ and ‘cut’. For a somewhat longer sound as in ‘bark’, we propose the use of aa.

The use of e and ee will be reserved for short and long sounds as in ‘bet’ and ‘bee’, respectively. The vowel ‘i’ will be used as in English words ‘sit’ or ‘bill’. The letters o and oo will be used as in ‘go’ and in ‘root’. The last vowel ‘u’ will be used as the first u in the word Urdu itself, but for the second u which is a bit longer than the first, we propose oo. However, as it is used in the final syllable of Urdu, its use for oo can be tolerated.

The vowels will be used only to give an accent to a consonant. They will never replace an Urdu consonant. This may only happen in an Arabic origin word when A is silent, such as in bAlkl (entirely) which is pronounced as bilkul; here A is silent. We propose that this word should, therefore, be written as bi(A)lkul, i.e., a consonant which is written but not pronounced will be placed within brackets.

Consonants: Since all the letters in Urdu alphabet are consonants, they will have to be described in detail.

A: The first letter in Urdu is of two types — long and short. When it is used as a long A, usually there is a special superscript to indicate it. Since we do not use any subscript or superscript, we may designate this long A as Aa, whereas the short one will be simply A.

Let us take a poignant example: jab taaj aaaj mila (when received the crown today). Consider the three Urdu words jab (when), tAj (crown) and Aaj (today). In the first word, a indicates that there is a superscript on j. In the second word, A is pronounced as aa in taaj, while in the third it has a still longer pronunciation, aaaj. In Roman Urdu, we can use aa = A and aaa = Aa, and hence the above example will be written as jab tAj Aaj milA.

Since A is a consonant, it may also be pronounced differently than above according to sup or sub attached to this letter. An Urdu word, As may be is (this) or us (that), according to the accent used. In these cases in Roman Urdu, we will not use the letter A but will write the word only phonetically. For such cases, the vowels should be replaced by A when returning to Urdu script from the Roman Urdu.

b, p, t, T, TO, c: The first two letters will be used as they are used in English. The letter t will be used as a soft sound as in French and German languages. For a hard sound, as in English, we will use T. TO is like t but finishes with an o sound. The word talab (need) should be written as TOalab according to present rules.

It may appear to be complicated but it is stressed that when returning to Urdu script from these two versions, only the latter will translate into the correct form whereas the former will give different possibilities of spellings in Urdu. The letter c will be always used as in ‘city’ and never as in ‘cat’.

j, CH, H, KH: The use of j will be as in jam. CH is the same as ch, except that Urdu CH is a single letter while ch is a combination of two letters c and h. Also, we will always use CH as ch is used in ‘charge’ and never as in ‘character’. The same is true for KH. It will be always used as in KHAky (khaki) or KHudA (God). The letter H is like h but much more throaty as in ‘muHammad’.

d, D, r, R: d is soft as in French, while D is the hard counterpart as in ‘do’ in English. r and R have the same relations as d and D in Urdu. Thus, r is soft and R is hard.

Z, z, z’, ZD, ZO: We are very rich in z-sounding letters, moreover, they are frequently used. Z and z have the same pronunciation but their use differentiates the meaning of the words. For example, ZAt (race) and zanjeer (chain) where Z and z cannot be interchanged.

z is a letter which is not used very often. It is of Persian origin and it has a bit whistling sound as in z’Alah (hail-stone). ZD is pronounced with a mixed sound of z and d. The Muslim fasting month is sometime written as ramadan and sometime as ramazan. The right form will be ramaZDAn. In any case z and d in usual spelling should be put together. ZO is also a strange letter which starts with a z sound but ends with a slight o sound as in ZOAlim (cruel).

s, SH, S: s and SH are the same as in English words ‘sit’ and ‘shoe’, respectively, except that in Urdu SH is a single letter. The letter S starts with an s sound, but when attached to another letter, it very much sounds like SO. Phonetically, it is difficult to make a difference between s and S. For example, between sadA (always) and SadA (voice). It may be recalled here that the distinction between the pronunciation of s and S, although lost in Urdu, is audible in the Arabic language.

A: It is like A but is pronounced from deep throat like A’Alim (learned). Proper names such as Arif and Moin, as they are widely written, should be written as A’Arif and moA’een or moA’yn.

GH: It is not gh as in ghanTA (hour, clock) but it will be used as in the name of famous Urdu poet GHAlib, with a gargling sound.

f, k, g, l, m, n(N): These letters will be used as they are commonly used in English except that g will never be used as in ‘gentle’ but always as in ‘good’. N represents simply a nasal sound of n as in mAN (mother). This nasal sound of n is quite common in French.

q: When k is pronounced from deep throat, it becomes q such as in qalam (pen).

w, h, hh: w is as in water. v may also be used in place of w except that v is not pronounced the same in other European languages as in English. The German car Volkswagen is pronounced as ‘Folkswagen’ whereas the Spanish town Valladolid is pronounced Balladolid. In Urdu, when no vowel is attached to w, it will be pronounced as o or oo such as in bwlw (talk) and jwn (June). The first word is pronounced as bolo and the second as joon.

When w is used as oo, we will write it with capital letter. The word jwn will be written as jWn in Roman Urdu. The letter h will be mostly active as in home except sometimes when it is at the end of a word, where it will be silent as in ‘hour’. When it is silent we will not write it in Roman text. hh is a special letter which when attached to another consonant gives an h sounding letters as we have already explained in paragraph earlier with the help of a single h. So in Roman Urdu this particular letter will never be used.

a’, y, ey: a represent a half of the first letter A. It is pronounced more rapidly than A as in Aaa’indah (in future). y and ey are the consonants used as in ‘baby’ and ‘obey’ respectively. So when no vowel is attached to y, it will be like ee.

Let us recall once again that when no vowels are attached with the three letters A, w (W) and y, they will be pronounced as aa, o (oo) and ee. This is the normal practice in Urdu as well.

In Urdu script, it is quite common to repeat a single consonant. For this purpose we use a special superscript over the consonant to be repeated. Therefore, whenever there is a repetition of a consonant in Roman Urdu, the particular consonant will be written only once in the Urdu script. The word moA’azziz (honourable) when transcribed in Urdu, will be written with letters mA’zz.

Quite often, two Urdu words are combined by -e- or -w- like jAn-e-man (my dear) or bAp-w-beyTA (father and son). In the first case in Urdu we write jAn man with a subscript below n to indicate -e-. In the second case we write three words bAp w beytA where w stands for ‘and’. In short, whenever a word in Roman Urdu is being transcribed in Urdu script, the following summary will be very useful. As all letters in Urdu are consonants, an Urdu word can never start or end with a vowel. The word Urdu itself is composed of four consonants ArdW. When a vowel is the first letter of a word, it should be replaced by A in Urdu script. When a word ends with a vowel, this last should be replaced by h (silent) in Urdu script.

As a general rule when we discard all the vowels in Roman Urdu we obtain the same word in Urdu script. Moreover, all double consonants in Roman Urdu should be replaced by single consonants such as a(l)llaah. In Urdu the first l in Allh is silent and the second l carries two superscripts which indicate its repetition and a long aa sound. Also, -w- in Roman Urdu should be replaced by w, and -e- should be ignored when transcribing the concerned word in Urdu script.

For readers who are interested in Roman Urdu to Urdu Script transcription, it is strongly suggested that they should consult the Appendix.

Eventually, it is once again underlined that the idea behind the proposal that we have outlined here is to give a fixed standard for writing Roman Urdu while trying to eliminate all possible ambiguities, and also to be able to revert to the correct Urdu version when reverting from Roman Urdu to Urdu script. That room for improvement exists, we do not doubt it. We hope that scholars in the field will take to this form of writing and bring about the necessary improvements and perfection.

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