Urdu is written in the Nastaliq style of the Perso-Arabic script. While it shares most of its letters with Arabic and Persian, Urdu adds a handful of characters to capture South Asian sounds — chiefly the retroflex consonants, a nasalisation marker, two distinct forms of he, and the word-final bari ye. This reference lists those Urdu-specific letters with their Unicode code points, names, and transliterations so you can identify, type, and encode them correctly.
How it works
Each Urdu-only letter is shown with the exact Unicode code point you would use in a string. Several were created by modifying an Arabic base:
- Retroflex ٹ ڈ ڑ — the dental letters ت د ر with a small superscript ط added above to signal the curled-tongue pronunciation.
- Nun ghunna ں — a dotless nun that marks nasalisation of the preceding vowel.
- Gol he ہ vs do-chashmi he ھ — the round he carries /h/ and vowels, while the “two-eyed” he only forms aspirated consonant digraphs like بھ.
- Choti ye ی vs bari ye ے — the regular ye and the open word-final “big ye”.
Example and tips
The aspirated word بھائی (bhāī, “brother”) relies on ھ: the sequence بھ encodes a single aspirated /bʰ/, not two letters. Mixing up ہ and ھ — or typing a regular ی where ے is required — is the most common encoding mistake in Urdu text. Click a code point in the table to copy the literal U+xxxx value, or click the glyph to copy the character itself.