Roman Urdu is often used as a stand-in online. Earlier attempts at digitizing the Urdu script relied on the Naskh Arabic font, which is straighter and therefore easier to code.

“The Urdu language might just fizzle out in the next 50 years if we don’t take solid steps to promote the language via technology and the internet,” Dr Atash Durrani, a linguist, said at the ...

India is a country whose wonderful diversity stems from the richness of its past. That includes the Urdu script.

Urdu readers, knowing the national alphabet, will have no problem reading the quotations. All regional languages use ‘naskh’ script (except Punjabi).

Despite her familiarity with spoken Urdu, the experience of learning the script was nothing short of confounding. She says, “The ligature—the manner in which letters bond with each other in ...

Urdu and Hindi are essentially the same language. It’s the script that keeps varying — sometimes Devanagari, sometimes Urdu. I write in both these scripts, but my main medium is still Urdu.

Dubbed by detractors as `a Pakistani agent` and praised by admirers as `India`s cultural ambassador` and `Urdu`s great voice`, Dr Prof Gopi Chand Narang, the distinguished Indian scholar, linguist ...

Other reasons sources of disagreement over the Urdu alphabet pertain to the status of Alif Mamdooda, commonly known as Alif Mad, Hamza and Noon Ghunna.

The script is beautiful, and we should not lose it. We should protect the Urdu script just like how we preserve our folk arts. Is Hinglish taking away from the purity of our languages?

In post-independence India, Urdu has undergone a strange trajectory both in the language politics and in the socio-cultural realm. Born, flourished and having seen the heyday of its glory in this ...

That now means there’s very little digital content available in Urdu that can compete with what users are used to in Latin scripts. Roman Urdu is often used as a stand-in online. Earlier attempts at ...