B. The alphabet

The Urdu alphabet is derived from the Arabic alphabet (technically called an abjad), with additions and modifications made over time to accommodate the sounds of Persian and Hindi-Urdu. The letters are grouped into series that share the same basic shape, each of which is named after the first letter in that group: alif, be, jīm, dāl, and so forth (hence ابجد abjad). Like other alphabets tracing their ancestry to the ancient Phoenician script—including Greek, Hebrew, Cyrillic, and the Latin alphabet used for English—the order of the letters is essentially arbitrary and based purely on historical tradition and not sound. However, there are similarities in the alphabetical order of each of these scripts: alif / alpha / aleph / A, be / beta / bet / B, and so on. For a delightful disquisition on these and related topics, see Michael Beard’s The Arabic Alphabet: A Guided Tour.

Familiarity with the order of the Urdu alphabet is useful in various contexts, most of all when consulting dictionaries. Below we have given all the letters in their standard order, as well as the diacritics that we’ve covered in this book. Each letter is accompanied by its name, sound, and Devanagari equivalent. We’ve also given each letter’s numerical value and formal transliteration in two widely used systems, those of the Journal of Urdu Studies (JUS) and Library of Congress (LOC). These are useful to scholars who want to precisely specify both the sound and spelling of Urdu words. Doing so makes it possible to distinguish, for instance, حال ḥāl ‘condition’ from ہال hāl ‘shaking,’ and also from حل ḥal ‘solution’ and ہل hal ‘plow.’