Aazaad Scheme for Hindi-Urdu Romanization

Aazaad Scheme for Hindi-Urdu Romanization
Roman alphabet have been used for writing/learning Hindi-Urdu since 1700s. In 1796, Dr. John Borthwick Gilchrist published the first ever grammer of The Hindustani Language in English by the title, "A Grammar, of the Hindoostanee Language ". Since then there's a well established history of Hindi-Urdu publications in Roman alphabet. Throughout the 1800s uptil 1947, hundreds of works inclduding scores of Grammars and Dictionries were published by pioneer linguists and philologists like Dr. Gilchrist, J. T. Platt, Duncan Forbes etc using several romanization schemes. Most of the earlier schemes used diacritics to map indic phonemes to roman graphemes. There was even a Roman Urdu Society in late 1800s which published a regular journal advocating Romanization of Urdu -the then official language of British India- by the name of Roman Urdu Journal with the stated agenda, "To Advocate the Use of Roman Alphabet in Oriental Languages"

One of the earliest inspirations behind HBI was the Uddin_and_Begum_Urdu-Hindustani_Romanization scheme developed and proposed by late Syed Fasih Uddin & Quader Unissa Begum. The Uddin-Begum Scheme is so far the only standard which specifically aims to address Hindustani Language. Several modern systems such as ITRANS have been around for a while too, however, no one system or standard has gained wide currency since there's no 'official' attention. Both Survey of India and Survey of Pakistan use simpilified Hunterian Transliteration System for Indic Romanization. General people intuitively follow the coventions evolved out of the application of hunterian scheme to the local accent of Hamari Boli.

For now, we'll be starting with a modified and simplified hybrid of the Hunterian and Uddin-Begum schemes, involving only standard English Alphabet, available on every keyboard & keypad. However, since the very idea is "Open Language Planning", other suitable schemes and suggestions will also be evaluated and deliberated at project wiki. Through community input and collaboration, we hope to refine and evolve an even more detailed system over time.

 Aazaad Letters of Alphabet for Nastaaleeq

 Aazaad Letters of Alphabet for Devanagari