اردو
Lingo7 lets you read books with a translation under every sentence in 49 languages. Urdu is not one of them yet. Ask for it below, and see what adding it takes and what reading Urdu involves.
Lingo7 does not read Urdu yet: the app has no Urdu dictionary, audio or books, and its reader still has to be mirrored for right-to-left text. You can vote for Urdu here. Leave your email to vote; we add the most requested languages first and write to you once, when Urdu is ready.
We add the most requested languages first. Leave your email and we'll write to you once, when Urdu is ready.
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We use your email only to tell you when Urdu launches, and delete it whenever you ask. Privacy policy
The demo below is the live reader with a German book. Urdu would work the same way once it is added.
Spoken in: Pakistan; India (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Telangana, Delhi and other states)
Urdu uses the Perso-Arabic alphabet, extended to 39 or 40 letters. The additions write sounds of the Indian subcontinent: ٹ, ڈ and ڑ for the retroflex t, d and r, and ھ (do-chashmi he) for aspiration, as in بھائی (bhai, brother). Short vowels are usually not written, so readers recognize words by their consonant outline, as in Arabic and Persian.
Books and newspapers are set in Nastaliq, a hanging style in which the letters of a word slope from upper right to lower left and stack on top of each other. It is compact and elegant but takes getting used to, especially for learners who know the flatter Naskh type of printed Arabic. Nastaliq is also hard to set by machine: the Noori Nastaliq typeface needed more than 20,000 ligatures, and the Daily Jang was the first Urdu newspaper composed in Nastaliq by computer.
Spoken Urdu and Hindi are close, but on the page they part ways: Urdu is written in Perso-Arabic letters, and its formal and literary vocabulary draws on Persian and Arabic. Urdu literature is best known for poetry, above all the ghazal. Rekhta, a free non-profit site, holds tens of thousands of ghazals and nazms and about 200,000 digitized books, with poetry shown in Devanagari and Roman letters as well as in Urdu script.
Our free tools cover the 49 languages in the app.
There is no date yet. We add the most requested languages first, and Urdu needs the work described on this page. Leave your email in the form and we will write to you once, when Urdu is ready.
Not yet. Lingo7 has no Urdu dictionary, audio or shelf of books, so a Urdu book would not get the sentence-by-sentence translation and word lookups the app is built on. The 49 languages it does read are listed on the home page.
One vote per email address per language. The count on this page shows a number once at least 10 people have asked, and refreshes within a minute of a new vote. Your email is stored only to tell you when Urdu launches, and deleted whenever you ask at support@lingoseven.com.
Nastaliq is the calligraphic style Urdu is printed in. Words slope down from right to left and letters stack, so they look different from the same letters in the Naskh type of Arabic books. It takes some getting used to, and large, clear print helps at the start.
Not without learning the script. Hindi and Urdu share their everyday grammar and vocabulary, but Urdu is written in Perso-Arabic letters, and literary Urdu uses many Persian and Arabic words that Hindi texts rarely use. Sites that print Urdu poetry in Devanagari, such as Rekhta, let Hindi readers cross over gradually.
A short poem of rhyming couplets, each complete in itself, joined by a shared rhyme and a refrain. It is the central form of classical Urdu poetry, from Mir Taqi Mir to Mirza Ghalib, and many ghazals are sung, so learners often hear them before they read them.