Urdu alphabet

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 and 40. The usual letter forms in Urdu Nastaliq are somewhat more diverse than for most Arabic-derived alphabets ^{[see below]}.

^nastaliq  0. Nastaliq Urdu has more forms of some letters than are typically found in Arabic.

^ 1. This may display in a different style if you do not have a Nastaliq font installed. ^[endnote]

^ 2. Hamza

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.

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.

^ 3. 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 (ʻ) okina, or it can be pronounced like Arabic hamza (ʼ) 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.

^4. Most vowel diacritics are omitted in most Urdu writing, but Urdu writing usually does distinguish alif mad, and include hamza over bari ye, gol he, and wow. For example, alif mad and bare alif in آزادی ("āzādī", ɑ:zɑ:d̪i, freedom[11]) are distinguished in most contexts.

^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.

^5. 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 hé look the same as gol hey or do-cashmi hé.

^6. Tāʼ marbūṭah is also sometimes considered a letter, though it is rarely used except for in certain loan words from Arabic.

^7. Ta mahbuta is regarded as a form of tā, the Arabic version of Urdu té, But it is not pronounced as such, and when replaced with an urdu letter in naturalised loan words it is usually replaced with gol he .

^[0.] These are illustrative only, in typing and typesetting the pre-combined characters in column 2 are used. Consonant diacritics are from unicode set "Arabic pedagogical symbols"[12]. U+25CC "DOTTED CIRCLE", U+00A0 NO-BREAK SPACE, and U+0640 "Arabic Tatweel Modifier Letter" are used to show diacritic positions. Tatweel doesn't work in Nastaliq fonts.

^Shapes: 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 [rasm | very early] versions of Arabic writing.

The Urdu alphabet isolated forms in 3 styles
Nastaliq [footnote 1]			ے ی و ھ ہ ن ں م ل گ ک ق ف غ ع ظ ط ض ص ش س ژ ز ڑ ر ذ ڈ د خ ح چ ج ث ٹ ت پ ب آ ا ئ ء
simplified [footnote 2]			ء ئ ا آ ب پ ت ٹ ث ج چ ح خ د ڈ ذ ر ڑ ز ژ س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ک گ ل م ن ں ہ ھ و ی ے
Naskh [footnote 3]			ء ئ ا آ ب پ ت ٹ ث ج چ ح خ د ڈ ذ ر ڑ ز ژ س ش ص ض ط ظ ع غ ف ق ک گ ل م ن ں ہ ھ و ی ے
The Urdu alphabet isolated forms in 17 fonts
•	Noto Nastaliq Urdu
•	Urdu Typesetting
•	Scheherazade
•	Lateef
•	Noto Naskh Arabic
•	Markazi Text
•	Noto Sans Arabic
•	Baloo Bhaijaan
•	El Messiri
•	Lemonada
•	Changa
•	Mada
•	Noto Kufi Arabic
•	Reem Kufi
•	Lalezar
•	Jomhuria
•	Rakkas

Footnotes:

^Footnote 1. 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.

^Footnote 2. 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".

^[Footnote 3. 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.

^{^[back to table of letters]}

^[back to letter names and phonemes]

For 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 for the Nastaliq style in which Urdu is written, even in the most mundane or informal documents, uses more than three general forms for many letters.

The names of 10 Urdu letters to show the variable letter forms in context. First and fourth rows: isolated letters, second and fifth rows: the names of those letters, third and sixth rows: the letter names broken up into individual letters.

^i. The ijam diacritic characters are illustrative only, in most typesetting the colonies characters in the middle of the table are used.

^ii. Nūn Ghūnna in the middle of a word is often an ommitted diacritic.

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:

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, اب ab, اسم ism, اڑ uṛ. As a vowel, it represents the long "a" (/ɑː/), for example, بھاگنا 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, آپ āp.

Wāʾo is used, as a consonant/semivowel, for "w" (/w/) and its allophonic development, the labiodental approximant (/ʋ/), and, as a vowel, for long "u" (/uː/), long "o" (/oː/) and the monophthongized diphthong "au" (/ɔː/). However, when preceded by a k͟he (خ), wāʾo sometimes renders the short "u" (/ʊ/), for example, in خود k͟hud.

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

Baṛī ye (ے) 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.

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

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 (ـْـ , Arabic sukun) is used to indicate a consonant cluster and tashdid (ـّـ, 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.[32]

He in very different fonts Nastaliq (N), Arial (A), and Tahoma (T) ^[footnote]

Letter name and unicode	Isolated Form			Final Form			Middle Form			Initial Form
	N	A	T	N	A	T	N	A	T	N	A	T
گول ہے Gol he U+06C1[33]	ہ	ہ	ہ	‍ہ	ـہ	ـہ	‍ہ‍	ـہـ	ـہـ	ہ‍	ہـ	ہـ
دو چشمی ہے Do-cashmī he U+06BE[34]	ھ	ھ	ہ	‍ھ	ـھ	ـہ	‍ھ‍	ـھـ	ـہـ	ھ‍	ھـ	ہـ
Arabic Letter Heh U+0647[35]	ه	ه	ه	‍ه	ـه	ـه	‍ه‍	ـهـ	ـهـ	ه‍	هـ	هـ

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,[36] or SIL International's Awami Nastaliq.[37]
• 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.

'Footnote:' ^ə . The Devanagari equivalents all add a schwa ə vowel to the IPA.

[40] IPA - Transliterate - LOC d̪ʱ dʰ dh [40] IPA - Transliterate - LOC ʈʰ ʈʰ ṭh [40] IPA - Transliterate - LOC ɖʱ ɖʰ ḍh [40] IPA - Transliterate - LOC kʰ kʰ kh [40] IPA - Transliterate - LOC ɡʱ gʰ gh [40] IPA - Transliterate - LOC t͡ʃʰ čʰ ch [40] IPA - Transliterate - LOC hʱ هʰ hh [40] IPA - Transliterate - LOC mʱ mʰ mh [40] IPA - Transliterate - LOC nʱ nʰ nh [40] ɽʱ ɽʰ ṛh

[41]