Urdu in the AI Age: Why a Major Language Still Struggles Online
Urdu in the AI Age: Why a Major Language Still Struggles Online
Most people who care about Urdu tend to fall into one of two camps. On one side are those who ask, "Who even reads Urdu these days? Where is the new generation?" On the other are those who insist that Urdu ranks among the world's most popular and influential languages, often citing its supposed status at the United Nations.
Every few months, the second group celebrates when the UN releases a message in Urdu, treating it as proof that Urdu has become the seventh or eighth official global language. With all due respect, this claim does not hold up. The United Nations has only six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. Urdu is not a seventh or eighth official language. The UN's own website lists exactly those six.
A more accurate statement would be: Urdu is not one of the UN's six official languages, but the organization does recognize it as an important language for global communication and occasionally releases key messages — including New Year greetings — in Urdu. The 2026 New Year message, for example, was not released in "eight languages with Urdu as the eighth." It appeared in the six official languages plus several additional ones, including German, Hindi, Swahili, Portuguese, and Urdu. Drawing a formal "eighth place" ranking from this is misleading.
That said, the separate claim that "Urdu is the eighth most spoken language in the world" is a different matter entirely. Any such claim, however, requires credible evidence. If someone makes it, they should be ready to back it up with data.
Urdu as a Low-Resource Language in AI
Despite being a major literary, journalistic, and cultural language, Urdu is still classified as a low-resource language in the context of artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP). The problem is not a lack of content. Millions of books, newspapers, magazines, research papers, and web pages exist in Urdu. But much of this material is either only in printed form, available as scanned images, or stored in non-standard formats that machines cannot directly process.
By contrast, English benefits from billions of words of clean, structured, and labeled data. Urdu datasets are not only fewer in number but also scattered, often duplicated, and unclear in terms of licensing. Simply saying "there is a lot of Urdu content online" is not enough. Modern AI systems do not need raw text; they need clean, standardized, diverse, and legally usable data.
Linguistic and Script Complexity
The challenge goes beyond data volume. Urdu's linguistic and script features add another layer of difficulty. The Perso-Arabic script, multiple letter forms, diacritics, the use of hamza, and inconsistent spacing between words make tokenization — the process of breaking text into recognizable units — hard for machines.
Urdu also exists in many forms: standard Urdu in India and Pakistan, regional variations, literary language, journalistic style, everyday speech, social media usage, and Roman Urdu. Roman Urdu, in particular, has no stable spelling standard. A single word can be written in multiple ways, and mixing English and Urdu is common. A 2025 ACL study highlighted Roman Urdu as severely underrepresented, noting that even dedicated information-retrieval datasets for it were missing.
Impact on Current AI Systems
All these gaps directly affect how well AI systems handle Urdu. Large multilingual models can generate Urdu text, but they still show weaknesses in grammar, idioms, cultural context, nuanced translation, fact-checking, and deep understanding of long passages.
Changing this situation will not happen just by putting more Urdu text online. What is needed is an organized Urdu Language Data Infrastructure. This would include:
- Millions of words of copyright-free corpus
- Representation across different domains
- High-quality parallel corpora for translation
- POS-tagged datasets
- Named-entity databases
- Morphological lexicons
- Dependency treebanks for sentence structure
- Speech-to-text corpora
- Human-evaluated benchmarks
The real point is this: Urdu is not a low-resource language because it lacks content. It is low-resource because much of its intellectual and cultural wealth has not yet been converted into machine-readable linguistic data. The day universities, Urdu institutions, publishers, newspapers, and computational linguists work together on this, Urdu will move from being under-resourced to becoming a truly well-equipped digital language.