Which romanization scheme is used?

It follows the National Language Authority (Muqtadira Qaumi Zaban) of Pakistan scheme, which uses dotted diacritics for retroflex and nasal letters rather than ad-hoc spellings, making the romanization reversible and consistent.

How are retroflex letters shown?

Retroflex letters use under-dot diacritics: ٹ becomes ṭ, ڈ becomes ḍ, and ڑ becomes ṛ. The noon ghunna ں becomes ñ. These distinguish Urdu sounds that plain Latin letters would merge.

What happens with aspirated consonants?

Aspiration is written in Urdu with the do-chashmi he (ھ) after a consonant. The tool detects that pair and outputs a digraph such as bh, ph, th, or kh, matching standard romanization practice.

Is the transliteration perfectly reversible?

It is close but not lossless. Urdu spelling underspecifies short vowels and several letters share a Latin form (for example ز, ذ, ض, ظ all map to z), so back-conversion needs context. It is meant for readable romanization, not round-trip encoding.

Does my text leave the browser?

No. The mapping runs entirely client-side in JavaScript. Nothing you enter is uploaded, stored, or logged.

Urdu to Latin Transliteration

Email me this result

Get this tool's output sent to your inbox, plus one useful tool a week. No spam, unsubscribe any time.

When Urdu has to appear in a system that cannot render Nastaliq — a citation, an SMS gateway, or a Latin-only database — it is romanized into Latin script. Doing that consistently requires a standard scheme rather than guesswork. This tool applies the National Language Authority romanization.

How it works

Each Urdu character is looked up in a mapping table built from the NLA scheme. Consonants, long vowels, and the vowel signs (harakat) each have a Latin equivalent, with diacritics preserving the distinctions Latin would otherwise lose:

ٹ → ṭ    ڈ → ḍ    ڑ → ṛ    ں → ñ
غ → gh   خ → kh   ش → sh   چ → ch

Aspirated consonants are handled by a look-ahead: whenever a consonant is followed by the do-chashmi he (ھ), the pair is emitted as a digraph such as bh or kh. Zero-width non-joiners are dropped, and unknown characters pass through unchanged.

Example and notes

پاکستان زندہ باد romanizes to a readable Latin string using p for پ, k for ک, and so on. Bear in mind that Urdu orthography does not always write short vowels, so the output reflects what is spelled rather than every spoken vowel — this is inherent to romanizing an Arabic-derived script and is true of every scheme. Treat the result as a faithful reading aid, not a phonetic transcription.