The first time you see Urdu printed properly, in the Nastaliq style, it looks less like a line of text than a staircase: each word slopes down from right to left, and its letters sit partly on top of one another. That image puts some people off. It shouldn't. If you want to learn Urdu, the script is a few weeks of honest work, and behind it waits a language with friendly grammar, a great deal of vocabulary shared with Hindi, and some of the finest poetry in South Asia.
Where Urdu is spoken
Urdu is the national language of Pakistan and the language Pakistanis use with each other when their home languages differ. Only a minority grow up speaking it at home: most start with Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, Saraiki, Balochi or another regional language and take on Urdu at school, from television and in the cities. In India, Urdu is one of the 22 languages listed in the constitution and has tens of millions of native speakers, especially in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Telangana and the big cities of the north. Counting second-language speakers, well over 200 million people use it.
Abroad it lives on in families from Pakistan and India in Britain, the Gulf, North America and Scandinavia, often in homes where the grandparents read Urdu newspapers and the grandchildren follow most of the conversation but can't read a line. A good share of adult Urdu learners are those grandchildren, and they start with an advantage: the ear is already trained.
How to learn Urdu script, Nastaliq included
Urdu is written right to left in an extended form of the Perso-Arabic script. If you've learned some Arabic or Persian letters, most shapes will be familiar. If you haven't, these points make it manageable:
- Letters join inside a word and change shape depending on their position, but the core shape stays recognisable, and the dots do most of the work of telling letters apart.
- Short vowels usually aren't written. پانی (pānī, water) happens to show all its vowels, but دل (dil, heart) is written just d-l, and you know the i because you know the word.
- Urdu adds letters Arabic doesn't have: ٹ (ṭ), ڈ (ḍ) and ڑ (ṛ) for sounds made with the tongue curled back, ں for a nasal vowel at the end of a word, ے for a final e, and ھ, which turns the letter before it into an aspirated one, so ک is k and کھ is kh.
- One spelling can hide two words. میں is both main, "I", and mein, "in". Context sorts it out faster than you'd think.
Nastaliq itself is the hard part. Many beginners' books start with the more upright Naskh style, and that's fine for a week or so, but switch early, because most printed Urdu, from newspapers to shop signs, is in Nastaliq.
Questions people ask before they learn Urdu
Is Urdu the same as Hindi?
In everyday speech, very nearly. A conversation about the weather or the price of onions sounds almost identical, and the grammar is the same down to the endings. The two separate in writing, because Hindi uses Devanagari, and in formal vocabulary: Urdu takes its learned words from Persian and Arabic, Hindi from Sanskrit. "Question" is سوال (savāl) in Urdu and in everyday Hindi, but प्रश्न (prashn) in formal Hindi. Learning one gets you a long way into the other; our guide to learning Hindi covers the Devanagari side.
Can I learn Urdu without the script?
For the first week or two, yes, and transliteration is a perfectly good crutch. After that it holds you back. Roman Urdu has no fixed spelling, so the same word turns up as shukriya, shukriyah and shukria, and everything you'll eventually want to read, from shop signs to poetry, is in Urdu script. Start reading properly within the first month.
How long does it take?
The US Foreign Service Institute, which measures difficulty for English speakers, puts Urdu in Category III: about 44 weeks of full-time study to reach professional working proficiency. There's no official figure for speakers of other languages, and anyone who grew up with Hindi or Punjabi will move much faster. Everyday conversation needs far less than professional proficiency; our piece on how long it takes to learn a language breaks it down by level.
