Hindustani orthography

Hindustani, Hindi, and Urdu have been written in several different scripts. Most Hindi texts are written in the Devanagari script, which is derived from the Brāhmī script of Ancient India. Most Urdu texts are written in the Urdu alphabet, which comes from the Perso-Arabic script. Hindustani has been written in both scripts. In recent years the Roman alphabet has been used in these languages for technological or internationalization reasons.

Devanagari script

The Devanagari script is an abugida writing system, so the written form of consonants have an inherent default vowel afterward, namely a schwa. Consonants which have other vowels afterward use diacritical marks around the consonant. The script is written from left to right, with a top-bar connecting the letters together.

Perso-Arabic script

The Perso-Arabic script is an extension of the Arabic alphabet. It is written from right to left, and most letters connect to each other. This leads to different forms of a letter depending on its position in a word, although the different forms generally resemble each other. Most vowels are omitted in normal texts, although they may be written for disambiguation or pedagogical purposes. Urdu is primarily written in a calligraphic style of the script called Nasta'liq.

See Also: Nasta'liq script

Romanized Hindustani

The Latin alphabet has been used to write Hindustani for technological or internationalization reasons. Roman Urdu uses the Basic Latin alphabet. It is most commonly used by young native speakers for technological applications, such as chat, emails and SMS.

ITRANS, ISCII, IAST, and Harvard-Kyoto romanization schemes have been employed primarily for usage by non-native speakers who are more familiar with the Latin alphabet.

See Also: Roman Urdu

ee also

* Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu)
* Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) word etymology
* Hindustani (Hindi-Urdu) phonology
* Hindustani grammar