The Fight to Preserve the Urdu Script in the Digital World

Zeerak Ahmed has spent years in the U.S., working for some of the world's biggest tech companies. But one thing he has grown frustrated with is how "computing treats non-Latin languages as second class citizens." One such language is his mother tongue, Urdu, the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, which is also widely spoken in India. Ahmed, who is from Lahore, has had many conversations with his friends and family about the difficulties of trying to use existing Urdu keyboards or read Urdu type. And he has witnessed many young people instead resorting to English or so-called Roman Urdu, using the Latin script to produce a phonetic transliteration, in the absence of a better solution.