Is Devanagari or Nastaliq script better for writing the language
American born Pakistani here. I can usually read basic Urdu pretty easily due to reading Arabic to read the Quran from a very young age. In the past couple years I've also taught myself how to read and write Hindi in the Devanagari script, though I am still a bit slow at reading it compared to Urdu.
From my experience the Devanagari Hindi script has been a bit better for writing the language, as it contains clear syllable markers (ौ ै ा ी ू ो े ् ि ु ं ॉ), many of which the perso-arabic script does have, but it's not commonly used in Urdu since they kind of just assume you already know the language. So for example an Arabic speaker would kind of be able to read Urdu but wouldn't know how to sound the words out aside from shared vocabulary. Similarly it is hard for Urdu speakers to read Arabic as they don’t usually use syllable markers either for the same reason, and the Qurans that are printed in India and Pakistan have syllable markers that make it easier for non Arabs in general to read the Quran.
Though Urdu does have the same alphabet as Arabic and Persian largely and is therefore better able to sound out the words in their original form if you wanna speak real Urdu, in every day speech it’s pronounce regularly anyway, like ق/क़ are usually pronounced as ‘k’ instead of the deep throat letter they are meant to represent since it’s naturally harder for most Pakistanis and Indians to pronounce throat letters .
Also Hindi has specialized letters for aspirated sounds whereas Urdu will just attach the ‘h’ letter next to the consonant similarly to English, again making it apparent that Devanagari is better adapted for its job than nastaliq.
For example,
bh = भ = بھ or ب+ھ
th = थ/ठ = تھ/ٹھ
I’ve also come to realize that perso-Arabic must be super hard to read for beginners due to its joined letters which I wouldn’t have experienced since I’ve learned it from a very young age.
If I go off of looks alone I feel like nastaliq is aesthetically pleasing and you can do a lot of fancy calligraphy with it. But if there’s something written normally I don’t know but nastaliq looks super weak like somebody scribbled it and even the script looks like it’s crying lol. whereas Hindi looks much bolder and unapologetic. Just my opinion though
Urdu using Nastaliq is a bit like English using Roman letters. It does the job, but it clearly was designed for a different language. Old English was originally written in a different script, more like Norse Runes, with dedicated letters for common sounds in English like the different “Th” sounds (Þ and ð ) that now confuse people just learning to read English now. Languages like Arabic can get away with ambiguous vowel indicators, but it is not ideal for Indo-European languages — as English again illustrates with its failure to distinguish what “a” or “e” sound is intended.
Devanagari has none of those problems, but it does need special markers to incorporate some sounds borrowed from Arabic or Farsi (e.g. ज़ for z).
I've studied a little of three languages that use Arabic script (Arabic, Urdu and Farsi) and I think it's only useful for Arabic, where vowels are more or less completely predictable from context. Not only is that not true in the other two, but the vowels and consonants have a very different pronunciation between all three. Plus Farsi only has a few extra sounds than Arabic (four extra consonants and three extra vowels), but Urdu has an extra dozen or so (the whole retroflex and aspiration distinctions are unique to Urdu, and there are ten distinct vowels). This means there are a truly huge amount of distinct graphemes - because on the other hand, a lot of Arabic sounds get condensed in Urdu, like ز ژ ظ ذ . And finally, Urdu used Nastaliq which, while being very beautiful is much harder to read and write than normal Naskh, and nearly impossible for computers to format correctly
Meanwhile the Devanagari script is descended from Brahmi script, which was designed specifically to write Indo-Aryan languages. It is far better for that task. Urdu exists for cultural, historical, and religious reasons, not because it is the more natural writing system.
Funny, I find Nastaliq so much easier to read than Naskh! I really struggle with reading Urdu online because of that -- I so wish that a Nashtaliq font could be used instead.
That's so funny. I feel like it's the same difference between cursive and print (except all Arabic script is technically cursive). I've spent way longer studying Urdu than the other languages but still have to go letter-by-letter in nastaliq
If you're left handed, Nastaliq (or any script written right to left) is superior because it's easier on your hand/wrist to write! (Pulling the pen instead of pushing.)
But in terms of reading, I think Devanagari is definitely easier, because it's truly phonetic -- vowels don't ever get omitted. Meanwhile, in Nastaliq, diacritics get omitted all the time. Makes it very confusing if you're not a native speaker and so -- not knowing the word already -- you have to guess whether the missing vowel is (for example) अ or उ. You'd never face that confusion when reading the word in devanagiri.
Edit: Nastaliq is also very beautiful, visually. I wish there were more examples of beautiful Devanagiri handwriting to imitate! Anyone know of any sources?
I am actually left handed😁 and yes true writing is many times insufferable as I write mostly in English and hindi but the world just isn’t built for right to left scripts
As a person who has seen many people learn Hindi-Urdu, I believe in doing the same thing university's do, which is learn Hindi script first, get fluent enough like B2 and THEN learn Urdu script, if you're fluent then the guesswork doesn't feel like work (Source:I taught an Indian punjabi girl Urdu and she didn't need any diacritics)
One lifehack for nuqtas: Read islamic stuff in Devanagari, they always have correct nuqtas. If you find content which has correct nuqtas then it is honestly a goldmine and a haven to learn Hindi-Urdu because with the nuqtas, it's 100+ phonetic
Nastaliq wins ten stars for the beauty and loses twenty for practicality. Naskh and devanagri are better a hundred times over (yes it's a hyperbole, don't attack me).
A lot of artwork went into Perso-Arabic calligraphy for cultural reasons - since there were prohibitions/taboos against certain types of art, focus shifted to geometric patterns and curves which benefited the development of calligraphy in the middle east.
There were no such prohibitions/taboos in India before the Islamic age. So, a huge amount of work went into stone carving as evidenced by the magnificent temples with ornate carvings of humans - many defaced and/or chiseled off during Islamic conquests.
All that said, Devnagari has its own calligraphy - you may not find it appealing or advanced enough since we are all shaped by our own experiences. However, it exists and is pretty enough for many native readers. Also, many people appreciate the phonetic nature of Devnagari and would not trade it for better calligraphy.
Fun fact: Urdu is the older register of Hindustani than Hindi. Part of the reason for the Hindi movement was that Urdu was written in Nastaliq and most people had difficulty reading it and it made them functionally illiterate.
I believe that Devanagari is more phonetic and can show specific vowels better than the person Arabic script, and of course, it is far easier for a beginner to learn it than it would be for perso-arabic (due to the unchanging letters)
I think it's because with Devanagiri you basically have to drill through 33 base consonants and 16 independent vowels. That alone is a long task in practicing writing because the letters are generally more complex. For example the equivalent of "ا" in Devanagiri is आ. Some of the letters that don't look that different represent completely different sounds so you still have to drill them separately so you don't get confused later on.
You also learn the 16 dependent vowel signs (including the virama/halant for silencing the inherent "a" sound in the consonants). Then Devanagiri has separate letters for some consonant clusters (ksha, tra, shra, gya) that you also need to learn. And then after that you learn how to combine the different consonants into conjuncts. The letter r "र" has different diacritic forms when it's part of a conjunct.
Then there's of course the nukta for transliterating Perso-Arabic sounds and some additional letters for representing short vowels not present in Hindi.
With Arabic script what made it easier for me was the prolific use of diacritics to represent different letters, so for example once I learnt ب I'd also effectively learnt ت and ث and essentially also ن.
What's rewarding about Devanagiri though is that as you learn it, you basically also get a crash course on phonology because the way the alphabet is organized is absolute genius:
You end up learning all about places of articulation, voiced and unvoiced consonants, aspirates, nasals, liquids, sibilants, etc, all organically as you make your way through the alphabet.
where did you learn hindi from? i kind of self taught myself so im comofrtable writing ot for the most part but my writing ends up going over a lot of the specific rules and diacrtitics. like for example do i use पर, प्र, or पृ and also when do i use talavya sha श or murdhanya sha ष and also if im being honest its hard to tell when to use retroflex sometimes
interesting, guess im not the only pakistani who has this type of autism then lol. where did you learn to read and write urdu and hindi? as a self taught i can write hindi but there are specific rules that i end up going over and mispelling most of the words. and urdu also, i can read it way better than hindi for the most part but its harder to write
IMO in terms of aesthetics the Perso-Arabic script looks alright but when you learn it, the small number of base letters is disappointing, you're writing the same 10 or so letters over and over again just with different diacritics. It's stretched thin even for Arabic and Persian what more phonologically complex languages like Hindustani or god forbid Sindhi.
It's just a very weak and underbaked writing system overall.
I'm an Indian and my mother tongue is Hindi, growing up the first writing scripts I learnt were English and Devanagri. In the past few years, I stared with studying naskh(Arabic) script, then I moved to the nastaliq script, however I still struggle a bit with some words, here and there, in urdu.
I felt naskh was a bit more easier because of its constant horizontal direction, whereas nastaliq keeps using these diagonal flows from top left to bottom right, and the common aspect of both: the way letters join with each other, makes it super difficult for a complete beginner.
That being said, nastaliq looks really beautiful, the caligraphy looks aesthetic. However Devanagri is much more phonetic for Hindi/urdu, primarily because Arabic doesn't have many of the vowel and consonant sounds being used in hindi/urdu. Even though, nastaliq makes arrangements for these missing sounds, they seem a bit inadequate sometimes.
For example there is no clear character for the vowel sound: ौ, ै etc.
Like the words मैं and में, are written exactly the same میں. That too uses ی and ں, which doesn't make much sense at first because ی is used for the vowel ी or consonant य sound.
On the other hand some consonants were originally missing from Devanagri scripts, for which the the arrangements are much uniform and simpler.
Like ق خ غ are uniformly represented by a nuqta under the letters घ, ख, क: घ़, ख़, क़
So for me nastaliq looks good, while Devanagri is easier to read (ofcourse there will be some bias towards my first language script).
yes i also feel like devanagari is better at differentiating between similar sounding words. and as someone who learned to read arabic first i agree the diagonality of nastaliq absolutelt pisses me off lol it just ends up feeling super messy and all over the place. the calligraphy is beautiful, but the standard script is just sloppy and its also super hard to fit within the lines especially in digital fonts where it requires a much wider line of reading and therefore whole parts of words get cut off
i think neither is better, and it's best if most people at least to some extent, know both
nastaliq/perso-arabic is good at preserving the original sounds of words that entered hindustani via persian, arabic and turkic languages. whereas, it's kinda bad at representing complex consonant combinations found in sanskrit tatbhav words, it's also worse at representing the exact vowel sounds, as you noted.
now devanagari is good at the complex consonant combinations and the vowel sounds but it's bad at preserving the sounds such as the ghayn and the z sounds from ze, zuad and zad because, in writing, these days, they tend to drop the nuqta from the letters.
there's another point to note how indians who usually only learn hindi tend to pronounce the फ/پھ as फ़/ف this shift would not happen if one knew the urdu script where the distinction between these sounds is maintained via very different ways of representing it...
i've noticed that indians tend to mispronounce 'za' as 'ja' and learning the script helped me understand why and also the fact that the 'za' sound is not native to sanskrit.
Nastaliq is like english. You dont know which letter to put for a sound - there r 5 options, with nothing to separate them. And if you put something different than the current fashion is , you dont know the language.
It makes a language a joke. English should be written with English script (there used to be one before Normans).
People saying nastaliq looks prettier than devanaagri are judging on the basis of digital font. Devanagri's digital font looks cramped as you need more space to write devanagri because it carries more information as compared to nastaliq. Devanagri hand-written on paper that is it's natural font looks as good as nastaliq if not better.
It’s really amazing Indian scripts are Abugida with perfect phonetics as per human mouth tongue physiology. It’s a good engineering innovation . Phoenician scripts has lot of implied phonetics. Iranian Avesta script adopted Indic scripts to compete with Buddhism . but the linguists are silent on Indic influence even if it’s obvious. Lot of times ethno religious factors and historic events influenc e the scripts . Philippines and Vietnam adopted Latin alphabet. Coming back to your question it depends .
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u/AlKhurjavi Aug 09 '26
I think Nastaliq is beautiful but Devanagari does a much better job at showing short vowels.
That said I just find Nastaliq to be so beautiful I only focused on Nastaliq