How a Pakistan-born developer's open letter to Tim Cook helped bring the Urdu language typeface to Apple devices
a script like “the wings of flying geese”—users resort to transliteration with Latin fonts. @AlizehKohari investigates. https://restofworld.org/... Tori Elliott / @telliotter : If you need something heartwarming and thoughtful today, it's this piece by @AlizehKohari. She talks to calligraphers and coders engaged in an act of love to maintain the beauty and integrity of Urdu online. A really great piece. @restofworld https://restofworld.org/... Tanya George / @tanyatypes : Glad to see the efforts of different experiments to digitise Nastaliq being documented so nicely @AlizehKohari writes so well about the difficulty to bring Nastaliq online. The story about the father son duo of MehrType is especially lovely https://restofworld.org/... @restofworld : Until 2014, you couldn't tweet or text in Urdu. It wasn't until one Pakistani developer sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook that the script was even made available on iOS #Longreads https://restofworld.org/... Mehreen Kasana / @mehreenkasana : This entire report about Urdu in the digital world is so heartwarming, moving, wise (and fun! most importantly, fun!). https://restofworld.org/... https://twitter.com/... Anup Kaphle / @anupkaphle : Urdu is written in an alphabet derived from Arabic. But while Arabic is written in a script called naskh, which is simpler and more linear, Urdu employs an ornate style of writing, called nastaʿlīq. Read our story. (And maybe tell @kumailn about it, too). https://restofworld.org/... Manish Singh / @refsrc : But my 300 emails and blogs requesting Apple News+'s India launch remain unanswered. https://twitter.com/... @restofworld : If Urdu isn't digitized and fully integrated into the online world of tomorrow, not only will fewer people be able to use it online, but fewer people will read and write it altogether https://restofworld.org/... @restofworld : For the world's 170 million Urdu speakers, trying to text, tweet, or read Urdu online is still an uphill battle. For the centuries-old language, a fully digitized future could spell its inevitable death https://restofworld.org/... Zeerak Ahmed / @zeerakahmed : Was lucky to talk to @AlizehKohari and @restofworld about the challenges of Urdu technology. This article has a great history of the challenges of Nastaliq, and I was able to shed some light on the mountains still to climb - data, AI, and its impact. https://restofworld.org/... @restofworld : A 2013 study found that, of the more than 7,000 languages used around the world, fewer than 5% were becoming fully functioning languages online. The expansion of the internet, in other words, is precipitating a massive linguistic extinction https://restofworld.org/... Anup Kaphle / @anupkaphle : What do you do if you can't type or text in your native language? In 2014, one Pakistani software developer decided to write to Apple CEO Tim Cook. A rich, fascinating #longreads by @AlizehKohari on how Pakistanis brought Urdu to the future https://restofworld.org/... @maxeemi : Hello @tim_cook ! Again, thank you! https://restofworld.org/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Urdu's Nastaliq script has long been a casualty of digitization: its flowing, calligraphic form resists standard fonts, so writers fall back on transliteration with Latin characters. The push to fix that ran through both advocacy and engineering — calligraphers and coders documented experiments to digitize Nastaliq, and a Pakistan-born developer took the case directly to Tim Cook in an open letter. The result is native Urdu typeface support in iOS, a win for script representation inside a mainstream operating system.
The story sits in a wider arc of language-digitization fights covered here before: the decade-long struggle to encode Tulu's script into Unicode showed how slow standards-body routes can be, while India's Koo built a fast-growing microblogging service specifically for regional-language speakers. Apple's move shows a third route — persuading the platform owner directly.
First-order effects
- Urdu speakers on Apple devices can now write in Nastaliq natively instead of resorting to Latin-font transliteration, preserving the script's visual form in everyday messaging and publishing.
Second-order effects
- Advocates for other unencoded or poorly supported scripts gain a proven playbook: a direct appeal to an OS vendor can move faster than a Unicode-standardization campaign like Tulu's.
Third-order effects
- If platform owners keep absorbing these requests, the digital survival of minority languages increasingly hinges on decisions by a handful of OS vendors — reinforcing the gatekeeper dynamics tech firms face as they court the next billion internet users, many of whom prefer voice, video, and images over text.
The trend: Language digitization is shifting from grassroots and standards-body efforts toward platform vendors as the decisive gatekeepers of which scripts live online.