Why Arabic, Persian and Urdu Letters Look the Same (and the Letters That Differ)

Short answer: Arabic, Persian and Urdu look alike because Persian and Urdu are written in the Arabic script. Persian took the 28 Arabic letters and added four new ones for sounds Arabic does not have (p, ch, zh, g). Urdu took the Persian set and added more letters for sounds of South Asia, such as the "hard" ṭ, ḍ, ṛ. So the three alphabets share a core of 28 letters, but each language has its own extras, a few letters drawn slightly differently, and very different pronunciation of some shared letters.

The script is shared. The languages are not: Arabic is a Semitic language, while Persian and Urdu are Indo-European languages. Urdu and Persian simply borrowed the writing system, together with thousands of Arabic words.

One script, three alphabets

Think of the Arabic script the way you think of the Latin alphabet. English, Spanish and Polish all use Latin letters, yet Spanish has ñ, Polish has ł, and the letter j sounds different in each. The same thing happened with Arabic letters:

The W3C's guide to Arabic-script layout lists the characters used by each language and confirms the pattern: پ چ ژ گ are core letters for Persian and only "auxiliary" for Arabic, which uses them occasionally for foreign names.

How it happened

After Islam spread to Iran in the 7th century, Arabic became the language of religion and learning there. Over the following centuries Persian, the everyday language, came to be written in Arabic letters, and a rich literature grew up in that script.

Persian was later a prestige language of literature and administration across much of South Asia for centuries. Urdu took its script through Persian, which is why Urdu has all the Persian extra letters and is traditionally written in the Persian-style Nastaʿlīq. Urdu then added its own letters for sounds that neither Arabic nor Persian needed.

Arabic words travelled with the script. That is why the word for "book" looks the same in all three:

Look closely at the last word. It is the same word, but Arabic ends it with ي (two dots below) and Persian and Urdu end it with ی (no dots). More on that below.

The 4 letters Persian adds

Arabic has no p, ch, zh (the sound in "measure") or hard g. Persian needed all four, so it created them by adding dots to existing Arabic shapes:

The trick is the same one Arabic itself uses: one basic shape, different dots, different sound. If you already know ب ت ث, the letter پ is easy to guess.

The letters Urdu adds

Urdu is the closest relative of Hindi, and it needs sounds that are common in South Asian languages. The most important additions are:

The small mark that turns ت into ٹ (and د into ڈ, ر into ڑ) is a small ṭoe, a little ط written on top. Once you know that, all three retroflex letters make sense.

The letter ھ is special: it is written after another letter to show that the sound is breathed out, so ک k becomes کھ kh (as in khānā), and گ g becomes گھ gh (as in ghar). Some teachers count these pairs as separate letters, which is why you will see different totals for the Urdu alphabet.

Same letter, slightly different shape

Three letters are drawn a little differently, and computers even store them as different characters:

You can see the kāf and yāʾ differences side by side in the word for "chair": Arabic كرسي (kursī), Urdu کرسی (kursī). Same letters, same word, two spellings.

The Arabic tāʾ marbūṭa (ة), the feminine ending, also changes. In Persian and Urdu, Arabic loanwords usually end in he or in a full t:

Same letter, different sound

This is the difference that matters most when you switch between the languages. Arabic gives each of its 28 letters its own sound. Persian and Urdu kept the Arabic spelling of Arabic loanwords, but pronounce several of those letters the same way. Richard Ishida's Urdu notes for the W3C put it simply: Urdu has "3 letters for s, and 4 for z, due the retention of Arabic spelling for words of Arabic origin."

Two more to know: in everyday Persian ق and غ are pronounced alike, as a deep gh-like sound, while in Arabic ق is a deep q and غ is a gargled gh.

For Persian and Urdu speakers learning Arabic, this table is the real homework. You already recognise ص, ض and ح, but in Arabic they are not "just another s, z and h". In Arabic, تِين (tīn, "figs") and طِين (ṭīn, "clay") are two different words, and only the first letter tells them apart. Our article on why some sounds are hard to pronounce explains why the mouth falls back on familiar sounds, and our free Arabic audio lessons let you hear the difference in real words.

Numbers: two families of "Arabic" digits

The digits that English calls "Arabic numerals" (0–9) are used everywhere. Next to them, Arabic and Persian have their own digit shapes, and they are not identical. The W3C layout guide lists two separate families, used in countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq on one side and Iran and Afghanistan on the other. Most digits match; the clearest differences are 4, 5 and 6:

Urdu uses the Persian set of digit characters, but according to the same W3C notes its usual shapes for 4, 5 and 7 differ again from the Arabic ones. As in Arabic, numbers are read left to right even inside right-to-left text.

One sentence, three languages

Here is a short sentence that shows the shared script and the very different grammar:

All three mean "this is a book". The word kitāb is shared, but Arabic needs no verb for "is", while Persian and Urdu put the verb (است ast, ہے hai) at the end, just as Hindi does with hai.

Can you read Arabic if you read Persian or Urdu?

You can sound out most Arabic words, and you will recognise many of them, but you will not understand Arabic sentences without studying Arabic. The script gives you a big head start; the grammar, most everyday vocabulary and the sounds still have to be learned. In practice:

• Your advantage: you already read right to left, you know the joining rules, and you know thousands of Arabic loanwords such as kitāb, qalam, ʿilm (knowledge) or waqt (time).
• What to relearn: the sounds in the table above, the Arabic forms of ك and ي, and reading Naskh if you are used to Nastaʿlīq.
• What is new: Arabic grammar (roots and patterns, verb forms, dual and plural endings) and the everyday Arabic words that never entered Persian or Urdu.

If you are going the other way, from Arabic to Persian or Urdu, you mainly need the extra letters, the three shape changes and the simpler sound system. Other languages written in the Arabic script, such as Pashto, Sindhi, Kurdish (Sorani) and Uyghur, follow the same idea with their own extra letters.

What to learn next

If you are starting Arabic from scratch, begin with our step-by-step guide on how to learn the Arabic alphabet fast: it groups the 28 letters into families and gives you a 7-day reading plan. Then decide which kind of Arabic to learn first, because the script is the same for Modern Standard Arabic and every spoken dialect.

Curious about a language that shares Arabic's roots but not its script? Our comparison of Arabic and Hebrew shows how two Semitic sister languages build words the same way with different alphabets.

Want to go beyond the letters? Our comparison of Persian (Farsi) and Arabic shows how different the two languages become once you look at grammar and everyday words.

Persian and Urdu readers often learn fastest with a course that treats the familiar letters as Arabic sounds from day one. That is exactly how our complete Arabic video course starts: each letter with its Arabic pronunciation, its shapes, and your first words to read.