Uddin and Begum Hindustani romanisation

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The Uddin and Begum Hindustani Romanization scheme is an international standard for romanising (transliterating into the Latin alphabet) Urdu and Hindi (sometimes jointly referred to as the Hindustani language, particularly in the era of British India). Syed Fasih Uddin and Quader Unissa Begum presented the scheme in 1992, at the First International Urdu Conference in Chicago.^[1]

Uddin and Begum based their scheme on the work^[which?] that John Borthwick Gilchrist and others began at Fort William College in Calcutta more than a century earlier. Gilchrist's romanisation system became the de facto standard for romanised Hindustani during the late 19th century.

Uddin and Begum attempted to improve on, and modernize, Gilchrist's system in a number of ways. For example, in the Uddin and Begum scheme, Urdu and Hindi characters correspond one-to-one. Also, diacritics indicate vowel phonics, whereas in the Gilchrist system the reader must infer vowel pronunciation from context. To facilitate Urdu and Hindustani romanisation in a much wider range of computer software, Uddin and Begum limited their character set to the common ASCII standard.