ngua franca of Pakistan and six Indian states, with about 70 million native speakers. Urdu is a part of the Hindustani language family, and is mutually intelligible with Hindi. Using the Nasta'liq style of the Persian alphabet, Urdu is traditionally associated with the Muslim population of the region, while Hindi (using the Devangari script) is connected with the Hindu community. This is the only mid-size, practical Urdu-English dictionary that includes both Urdu s genuine Nasta liq script and phonetic transcriptions to help learners pronounce words correctly. It includes more than 13,000 entries for Urdu and more than 9,000 entries for English, covering the vocabulary that one encounters most frequently in contact with Urdu speakers in everyday life as well as in modern literature and the media. This dictionary is for both non-Urdu speakers who are learning the language, and for Urdu readers who wish to find an accurate translation or pronunciation for a specific word.