Urdu to English Transliteration

A research-based guide or chart to romanization

There is a popular debate about Nastaliq versus Nashk scripts among the Perso-Arabic script-based language communities. Urdu is most commonly written in Nastaliq while common day Arabic and standardised religious texts adopt Nashk. To the untrained eye, technology developers, and non-natives, it looks like a calligraphy-versus-serif debate—a bunch of bourgeois making noise about the default Unicode standard being Nashk and disregarding it as a beautiful calligraphic dream.

Nastaliq Calligraphy by Hadi Seyedkhani (Iran)

But Nastaliq is varied, practical, and easier to read and write. While Naskh may have only 4 basic character shapes, Nastaliq contains 32—Nastaliq is elongated, overlapping, unspaced, non-monotonic, and artistically pronounced.¹ All of these are lost in the digital transcription. The Android, Windows, and web systems do not have a default Nastaliq font for Urdu and transcribe it in Nashk—much like Substack sulling the Urdu lyrics in this newsletter. Moreover, the Urdu and Hindi-speaking population is divided across borders and different scripts. Though they watch each other’s media, they mostly cannot read each other’s books. A representation of their differences:²

These are the main reasons that transliteration or romanization in texting, pop culture, and media have indubitably become a staple of the current generation. To pass off a lie of standardisation, TARJUMAN aspires to follow a regulated transcription guide. The one presented below is referenced from the IPA guide of Hindi and Urdu³, Rekhta⁴ and a research paper on Urdu and Hindi transliteration⁵.

Some Dictionaries

• Rekhta Dictionary

• Urdu Lughat

1. Arabic Script Based Language Character Recognition: Nasta’liq vs Naskh Analysis, Saeeda Naz et al. [DOI:10.1109/WCCIT.2013.6618740]

2. Towards AI-Enabled Approach for Urdu Text Recognition: A Legacy for Urdu Image Apprehension, Kamlesh Narwani et al. [DOI:10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3203426]

3. International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA] for Urdu and Hindi: Wikipedia

4. Rekhta’s Transliteration Key (in English)

5. Hindi to Urdu Conversion: Beyond Simple Transliteration, Bushra Jawaid and Tafseer Ahmed [CorpusID:14177761]