Urdu, a Turkish word meaning Lashkar, has a history of being a beautiful language. It has words from Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, Persian, Sanskrit. A language that was widely used and spoken in the 18th century in the subcontinent. Persian was the official language of the court and public before the East India Invasion.
‘Wo itar daan sa lehja meray buzurgoon ka,
Rachi basi hoi urdu zubaan ki khushboo’
Urdu is the 21st most spoken language in the world, yet it is the 10th language widely spoken worldwide. It is the official language of Pakistan. It was called Deccani, Rekhta, Urdu e Mu’alla, Dehlavi, Lahori, etc. The vocabulary was drawn from Persian so the written script was also Persianized. Now, the Nastaliq script is followed. Sometimes, Urdu is compared to Hindi and considered as the same language yet, they do belong to the same language family yet their grammatical structures are derived from Persian, Arabic, and Sanskrit. The first dictionary was compiled in the 18th century by Syed Ahmed Delavi as ‘Farhang-e-Asifya’.
‘Saleeqay se hawaon mein jo khusboo ghol saktay hain,
Abhi kuch log baaqi hain jo urdu bol saktay hain’
Lately, languages have their romanized script for texting or messaging. Primarily the reason was that the script was not available on computers or had technological limitations. They did not have other languages than English. So the people who were unable to use English started to in the romanized form. Although, it was not appreciated by the standard language speakers. It is fine for languages that don’t have wide coverage.
The interesting thing is Urdu and Hindi share the same lineage, yet they have differences. Just like we have Pakistani English and Indian English, we should have our own Standard Roman Urdu. Roman Urdu has many forms and every person follows his own roman Urdu. Like the word, چھوڑin India the word would be with ‘Chod’, whereas in Pakistan it would be ‘chorr’. There is a difference.
There are a lot of words that can have the following Roman Urdu and might be written in different forms:
- ہی-he, hi
- نہیں-nahien, naheen
- گلا-gala, galaa
- تو-tou, tou
- میں-mein, main
- یقین-yaqeen, yaqin
- ہوگی-hogi, hoge
- میرا-mera, maira
- دو-do, dou
- وادی-waadi, vadi
- دشمنوں-dushmanoon, dushmanoun
- رحمت-rehmat, rahmat
- کرونگا-karun ga, karoon ga
- وعدہ-wa’ada, vaada
- کون-kaun, kon
- معاملات-maamlaat, muamlaat
Most of us can relate to these words and maybe they are written in a different form as well. How do u write in Roman Urdu, is it similar to ours. You can share your Roman Urdu with us as well. Let’s compile a standardized Roman Urdu. We want you to help us. If you want to contribute to our Roman Urdu Dictionary please email us at our id: [email protected]