Roman Urdu
Urdu language written with the Latin script
Roman Urdu refers to the romanised use of Urdu, where the Urdu language is written using the English alphabet. It is mostly used for informal communication on the internet, social media, and text messaging.
According to the Urdu scholar Habib R. Sulemani in 2004: "Roman Urdu is strongly opposed by the traditional Arabic script lovers. Despite this opposition it is still used by most on the internet and computers due to limitations of most technologies as they do not have the Urdu script. Although, this script is under development and thus the net users are using the Roman script in their own ways. Popular websites like Jang Group have devised their own schemes for Roman Urdu. This is of great advantage for those who are not able to read the Arabic script. MSN, Yahoo and some desi-chat-rooms are working as laboratories for the evolving new script and language (Roman Urdu)."
Romanised Urdu is mutually intelligible with Romanised Hindi in informal contexts, unlike Urdu written in the Urdu alphabet and Hindi in Devanagari. Multinational corporations often use it as a cost-effective method for printing and advertising in order to market their products in both Pakistan and India.
Although the idea of romanising Urdu had been suggested several times, it was President Ayub Khan who most seriously suggested adopting the Latin alphabet for Urdu and all Pakistani languages during his rule of the country.
“Roman Urdu” enters the record as urdu language written with the Latin script. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Roman, Urdu and language can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3307116. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Roman Urdu” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.