Urdu alphabet

Urdu Alphabet اُرْدُو حُرُوفِ تَہَجِّی‌ Urdū ḥurūf-i tahajjī
The word Urdū written in the Urdu alphabet
Script type	Abjad
Official script	Pakistan  India  South Africa[1]
Languages	Urdu Balti[2] Shina Khowar Burushaski[3]
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic Phoenician Aramaic Nabataean Arabic Perso-Arabic Urdu Alphabet
Unicode
Unicode range	U+0600 to U+06FF U+0750 to U+077F U+FB50 to U+FDFF U+FE70 to U+FEFF
This article contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

This article contains Urdu text. Without proper rendering support, you may see unjoined letters running left to right or other symbols instead of Urdu script.

Writing systems
Abjad
Arabic   Hebrew   Tifinagh
Abugida
Canadian syllabic   Ethiopic   North Indic   South Indic   Thaana
Alphabetical
Armenian   Cyrillic   Georgian   Greek   Hangul   Latin   Mongolian
Logographic and Syllabic
Hanzi [L]   Kana [S] / Kanji [L]
v t e

The Urdu alphabet (Urdu: اردو حروفِ تہجی, romanized: urdū ḥurūf-i tahajjī) is the right-to-left alphabet used for writing Urdu. It is a modification of the Persian alphabet, which itself is derived from the Arabic script. It has official status in the republics of Pakistan, India and South Africa. The Urdu alphabet has up to 39^[4] or 40^[5] distinct letters with no distinct letter cases and is typically written in the calligraphic Nastaʿlīq script, whereas Arabic is more commonly written in the Naskh style.

Usually, bare transliterations of Urdu into the Latin alphabet (called Roman Urdu) omit many phonemic elements that have no equivalent in English or other languages commonly written in the Latin script.