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The Urdu alphabet (Urdu: اُردُو حُرُوفِ تَہَجِّی, 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 provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Hindi and Urdu in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them. Integrity must be maintained between the key and the transcriptions that link here; do not change any symbol or value without establishing consensus on the talk page first.
The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet. [note 7] For this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ʔ , originally had the form of a question mark with the dot removed.
Respelled syllables are visually separated by hyphens ("-"), and the stress on a syllable is indicated by capital letters. For example, the word "pronunciation" (/ p r ə ˌ n ʌ n s i ˈ eɪ ʃ ən /) is respelled prə-NUN-see-AY-shən. In this example, the primary and secondary stress are not distinguished because the difference is automatic.
It has a total of 52 letters, augmenting the Urdu with digraphs and eighteen new letters (ڄ ٺ ٽ ٿ ڀ ٻ ڙ ڍ ڊ ڏ ڌ ڇ ڃ ڦ ڻ ڱ ڳ ڪ) for sounds particular to Sindhi and other Indo-Aryan languages. Some letters that are distinguished in Arabic or Persian are homophones in Sindhi. Balochi and Pashto are written in Perso-Arabic script.
In Urdu, there is further short [a] (spelled ہ, as in کمرہ kamra) in word-final position, which contrasts with [aː] (spelled ا, as in لڑکا laṛkā). This contrast is often not realized by Urdu speakers, and always neutralized in Hindi (where both sounds uniformly correspond to [aː] ).
Transliteration, which adapts written form without altering the pronunciation when spoken out, is opposed to letter transcription, which is a letter by letter conversion of one language into another writing system. Still, most systems of transliteration map the letters of the source script to letters pronounced similarly in the target script ...
Note that Hindi–Urdu transliteration schemes can be used for Punjabi as well, for Gurmukhi (Eastern Punjabi) to Shahmukhi (Western Punjabi) conversion, since Shahmukhi is a superset of the Urdu alphabet (with 2 extra consonants) and the Gurmukhi script can be easily converted to the Devanagari script.