Home / Languages / Urdu (Arabic)

Urdu Alphabet (Arabic)

The letters and characters of Urdu written in the Arabic script, in order — every standard character with its name and codepoint, the additional and punctuation sets, and exactly how many fonts include them. About 313,093,257 people read or write it across 5 countries.

Standard characters

The minimal set of characters required for Urdu — the language's alphabet, in its traditional order. Tap a character to copy it; each name opens the full character page.

How the Urdu alphabet works

Urdu is written from right to left in a flowing, sloping form of the Arabic script — the style called Nastaliq, where words hang from the line rather than sit on it. The alphabet keeps the Arabic and Persian letters and adds what Urdu's own sounds need. Short vowels are marks above and below the line that everyday writing leaves out, and alif, vav and ye do the visible vowel work between them. As in Arabic and Persian, letters change shape by position and join into runs; the chart shows the standing-alone forms.

Urdu's own additions answer to the sound system it shares with Hindi. The retroflex letters ٹ, ڈ and ڑ are made with the tongue curled back against the roof of the mouth — a hard t, a hard d, and a single flicking flap that English has no equivalent for at all. Aspiration works by partnership: a second letter, the two-eyed ھ, follows a consonant to add a puff of breath, so بھ is bh, پھ is ph, کھ is kh — pairs that count as single sounds, written with two shapes. The last letter of many words, ے (the big ye), is a long open e found only at word end.

The Arabic inheritance is tidied the same way Persian tidied it: ث and ص read plain s, ذ ض ظ read plain z, and ط reads like ت. But Urdu keeps ق as a true deep k from the back of the throat, خ as the ch of loch, and غ as its gargled partner — those survive from Arabic and Persian loanwords that fill Urdu's formal vocabulary. The result reads in two registers at once: everyday words lean on the retroflexes and aspirates, while elevated words bring in the throat sounds.

Additional Characters

Used for foreign words, names and technical terms, and older forms of the language.

Punctuation characters

The marks used to separate sentences and to clarify meaning.

Where Urdu (Arabic) is read

Countries shaded by the share of their population that reads or writes Urdu in the Arabic script.