Judeo-Urdu

Writing system

The Judeo-Urdu dialect was written in the Hebrew script. The orthography is one of the primary reasons for this dialect being associated with Urdu, rather than Hindi, as the spelling of lemmas found in literature written in the Judeo-Urdu dialect seem to correlate with the Perso-Arab spelling. For instance, Arabic loanwords which contain the letters ط would be mapped to the Hebrew equivalent ט, a pattern which is consistent with other loanwords and loan-letters.

However, the representation of unique sounds found in Indo-Aryan languages, such as retroflex consonants as well as aspirated consonants, were not represented by unique or modified Hebrew letters. Rather, alveolar consonants were also used to represent these sounds paired with a Dagesh or Holam. This could create ambiguity as some letters, like Dalet, could denote up to four different phonemes, while an unvocalised Gimel could denote potentially up to five.