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"Urdu Consonantal and Vocalic Sounds " by Abdul Mannan Saleem, Hasan Kabir, Muhammad Khurram Riaz, Muhammad Mustafa Rafique, Nauman Khalid, Syed Raza Shahid. [Download]
ABSTRACT: It is a fact that no scientific speech processing research has been done so far, that can be the basis for improved applications and further research in Pakistan. One of the primary reasons is the absence of any core material related to the phonetic inventory of Urdu. This paper addresses this matter by attempting to provide a listing of all possible sounds that are present in Urdu language, and also attempts at justifying their presence.

"Speech Assessment Methods in Phonetic Alphabet" by Hassan Kabir, Abdul Mannan Saleem. [Download]
ABSTRACT: An important consideration to be kept in mind, while dealing with speech processing, especially speech synthesis, is that the computer cannot process the phonemic data directly as the way we write it in IPA symbols. The IPA symbols representing different sounds are just graphical symbols with no core meaning stored in the computer. For the processing, the phonemic data is stored using machine readable phonetic alphabets comprising of some standard character sets, e.g., ASCII, UNICODE, etc. This paper provides information for representing Urdu phonemes with one such standard by the name of SAMPA (Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabets).

"Study of Aspirated Continuants in Urdu" by Saad Inam Sheikh. [Download]
ABSTRACT: Recordings of aspirated continuants present in Urdu were made of four speakers. The experimental utterances consisted of meaningful words disguised in carrier sentences to ensure that the speaker does not guess the experiment and adjust his voice. The recordings were made with every aspirated continuant in every possible position.

"A Study on Glottal Stops in Urdu" by Syed Raza Shahid. [Download]
ABSTRACT: The glottal stops in Urdu language exist in every word or syllable position phonemically, but phonetics of Urdu exhibits a variable process of existence or removal of glottal stop at different word or syllable position. The study was performed to investigate and identify the rules, which brought forward the status of glottal stops in Urdu language. Furthermore the occurrence and the probability of glottal stops are dependent on the speaker's way of pronouncing.

"Nasal Aspirates in Urdu" by Umar Aziz. [Download]
ABSTRACT: Aspirated nasals are fairly common especially in the languages of the subcontinent.  Their possibility in Urdu however is very ambiguous.  Different authors present conflicting views on this.  Lack of any previous acoustic analysis of this phenomenon in Urdu only makes this subject more ambiguous. This study is based on acoustic analysis of recordings made by native Urdu speakers.  The results show that the possibility of aspirated nasals is very bleak except for the word medial /mh/.

"Aspirated Approximants in Urdu"  by Suleman Mazhar. [Download]
ABSTRACT: Urdu is a South Asian language.  Like other South Asian languages, its inventory has many aspirated sounds.  Aspirated approximants are rare in world languages and their existence in Urdu is therefore controversial. This paper investigates the existence of aspirated approximants in Urdu and concludes that they are not found in Urdu now.

"Variation between Palatal Voiced Fricative and Palatal Approximant in Urdu Spoken Language" by Sheraz Bahsir. [Download]

"Existence of [v] and [w] in Urdu Language" by Nauman Khalid. [Download]
ABSTRACT:The primary purpose of this experiment was to investigate the existence of the sounds [v] and [w] in Urdu.  Recordings of several sentences were made, and then analyzed through specialized software to construct the data.Generally speaking, both sounds were found to be present in Urdu, and there percentage of existence was analyzed.  The results were discussed in light of acoustic phonetics and earlier Urdu phonetic publications.

"Speech Synthesis of Urdu Vowels Using HLSyn" by Muhammad Usman Afzal. [Download]
ABSTRACT: This paper tries to give the brief overview of different kinds of speech synthesis systems (formant, concatenative and articulatory).   General steps, which are involved in the synthesis, are discussed. Moreover, the Klatt synthesizer is also discussed in some detail.

"Quality Analysis of Non-Nasal and Non-Aspirated Urdu Stops , Synthesized Using HLSyn Irfan Rafiq Synthesis of /ikis/ and /bais/ " by Mustafa Rafiq. [Download]
 ABSTRACT: HLSyn is a quasi-articulatory synthesizer (independent of any particular language) with a small set of parameters, which model the complex acoustic consequences of vocal tract. The primary motivation of using HLSyn is to combine the 'simplicity of control' of articulatory synthesizers with 'accuracy and efficiency' of formant synthesizers. The aim of this paper is to analyze the quality of non-nasal and non-aspirated Urdu Stops, synthesized using HLSyn

"SYNTHESIS OF /ikis/ (21) And /bais/ (22)" by Muhammad Mustafa Rafique. [Download]
ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the entire process which was used for the synthesis of words /ikis/ and /bais/.  A high level synthesizer HLSyn was used for this synthesis.  A perceptual experiment was done to evaluate the perceptual quality of the synthesized words.  Comparison of spectrograms of synthesized and recorded /ikis/ and /bais/ was also done.

"Synthesis of Oral and Nasal Vowels of Urdu" by Khurram Riaz. [Download]
Abstract: HLSyn a High level Synthesizer was used to synthesize the vowels. After synthesizing a perceptual experiment was performed to find out how successfully the synthesized vowels were perceived, moreover the spectrograms of synthesized vowels were compared with that of original vowels recorded. For nasal vowels bandwidths were also compared.

"Speaker Dependent Features in Stops and Affricates of native Urdu speakers " by Muhammad Jamal Sheikh. [Download]
ABSTRACT: The primary objective of this paper was to find phonetic cues that can be used for distinguishing between various speakers. The paper provides a brief review of the earlier researches done and some of the systems already implemented worldwide. Experiments, based on native Urdu speakers, were conducted for this purpose, and the observations were analyzed. The results inferred and the analysis done have lead to some phonetic cues that can be used for speaker identification and verification.

"Speaker Dependent Features in Approximants of Urdu" by Mustafa Mubashir Rizvi. [Download]
ABSTRACT: This paper suggests speaker dependent primary and secondary acoustic cues in approximants focusing the Urdu language. Experiment was conducted on seven speakers' samples.  The data was collected and analyzed to identify speakers.  The paper also suggests various cues, which can possibly identify speakers.  It also sheds some light on the problems faced during the experiments and the after effects of increase in speakers.

"The Duration of Vowel representing Kasre Izafat in the compound words of Urdu Language " by Mirza Fahad Arshad Baig. [Download]
ABSTRACT: The primary aim of this paper is to explore the duration of the vowel involved in Kasre Izafat in compound words of Urdu. Various sentences, spoken by various speakers, were recorded and analyzed using specialized speech analysis software. Results suggest that the vowel is indeed short.   The paper also sheds light on the topics of vowel duration and co-articulation. Furthermore, for the sake of analysis, stress rules of Urdu are also discussed in light of earlier Urdu phonetic publications.

"Urdu Nasal Consonants and their Phonological Behavior " by Syed Mustafa Shah. [Download]
ABSTRACT: This paper presents the list of nasal consonantal sounds in Urdu language. Furthermore, the observed phonological behavior of these sounds is also reported.

"Languages and Their Families"  by Nabeel Whyne. [Download]
ABSTRACT: There are over 6,800 languages spoken in the world, which are classified into more than 100 families by the linguists. The paper discusses the world's most spoken languages with major emphasis on Languages spoken in Pakistan. The paper would discuss the family hierarchy of languages, the region where they are spoken and the estimated number of speakers of the language. The family hierarchies would make it easy to see what languages have descended from a common source and have relationship. 

"Analysis of Urdu Syllabification using Maximal Onset Principle"  by Bilal Akram. [Download]
ABSTRACT: The paper compares the performance of MOP and SSP in forming Urdu syllables. Both the syllabification principles are applied on Urdu words and compared with the original syllabification of the words done by the native speakers. The patterns of the syllables are also extracted and it is observed that it depends upon the number of consonants in the consonant clusters; the phonotactic constraints of Urdu are also analyzed along with an epenthesis rule. In the end an algorithm is also given for the syllabification of Urdu words using these two syllabification principles.

"Syllabification Rules in Pushto"  by Jahangir Zaman Khan. [Download]
ABSTRACT: This paper will cover the discussion about the syllabification rules in Pashto. There are lots of ways of arranging of syllables in Pashto but some constraints are also there so that some syllables do not start words. The paper is discussing what pattern of consonant and vowel can be followed by particular patterns and why some patterns cannot occur in continuation.

"Syllabification Rules in Punjabi" by Hasan Kabir. [Download]
ABSTRACT: This paper describes an approach to syllabification that has been incorporated into Punjabi. It focuses on the syllabification rules i.e. how many syllable categories exist in Punjabi, syllabification constraints i.e. which phonemes cannot come in the start of a syllable, etc. and applicability of different syllabification algorithms on Punjabi. An algorithm for syllabification is also devised in the end. Previously most of the studies in this regard have been done on Western Languages. This paper also covers all such related details.

"Phonemic Inventory of Punjabi"  by Nayyara Karamat. [Download]
ABSTRACT: Punjabi belongs to Indo-Aryan family. In this paper its phonemic inventory is discussed. Dialect spoken in Lahore region is considered. Documented inventories were considered as basis of the analysis and then further experiments are conducted for investigation of status of the phonemes particular to the dialect.

"Syllable Templates in Urdu"  by Muhammad Noman Nazar. [Download]
ABSTRACT: Syllable templates play an important part in the syllabification algorithms and hence in the phonology of any language. The current paper investigates the syllable templates of Urdu. The results presented are based on a systematic analysis of a modest selection of words from a popular Urdu lexicon. The syllable templates extracted shed light on the influence of other languages over Urdu and raise some other interesting issues.

"Urdu Syllable Templates"  by Ahmad Ghazali. [Download]
ABSTRACT: This paper aims at determining the syllable templates of Urdu. A detailed experiment was carried out to analyze five thousand words of Urdu and determine all possible syllable templates. Eleven syllable templates were identified for Urdu and their frequencies of occurrence were determined. The syllable templates that were identified are: CV, CVC, CVCC, CVV, CVVC, CVVCC, V, VC, VCC, VV, and VVC. Later on, it was realized that Urdu has basically only first 6 templates and other 5 are derived from these fundamental templates.

"Syllable Stress in Urdu" by Shanza Nayyar. [Download]
ABSTRACT: Syllable stress plays a vital role in determining the pronunciation of a word in any language. In every language where the stress exists, a particular method of assigning stress is observed. This research is based on determining the appropriate algorithm, which assigns stress on the right syllable in Urdu language. From the data collected, 14 syllable structures in Urdu were identified. Although the common convention is that only single stress per word exists in Urdu but in some special cases, multiple stresses were also found.

"Assimilation Rules in Urdu"  by Abdul Mannan Saleem. [Download]
ABSTRACT: This paper tends to describe the role of assimilation in Urdu . Firstly the paper gives the brief introduction to assimilation rules and describes how assimilation plays a role in a language . Then it provides the information about the work done on different types of assimilation rules in different languages . And finally it provides the details of some of the assimilation rules in Urdu . These rules are complemented by the analysis of various words present in Urdu vocabulary.

"Deletion Rules in Urdu Language" by Sadaf Nawaz. [Download]
ABSTRACT: Languages often exhibit removal of some phoneme(s) from the phonemic representation resulting in somewhat different phonetic representation.  This is due to the application of phonological rules.  Deletion rules are the type of phonological rules. A category of which are the deletion rules which deal with the deletion of a vowel or a consonant (or in terms of metrical phonology the features of the timing slots).

"Assimilation and Dissimilation Rules in Urdu"  by Ayesha Zia. [Download]
ABSTRACT: The speakers of different languages all over the world show the characteristics of Assimilation and Dissimilation in their speech. Sometimes this Assimilation and Dissimilation is according to a specific rule and they occur in a certain context but sometimes they are quite random in nature. This paper is aimed to uncover these Assimilation and Dissimilation Rule, which are spoken by the speakers of Urdu.

"Formation of Generalization Words ("Mohmil") in Urdu" by Huda Sarfraz.  [Download]
ABSTRACT: "Mohmil" words are meaningless words in the Urdu Language used mostly for generalization purposes.  The formation of these words was investigated by studying documented generalization words and by conducting a survey, in which the subjects were to form generalizations for a list of words. 

"The Rules Governing the Writing-Pronunciation Contrast in Urdu : A Phonological study"  by Aamir Wali. [Download]
ABSTRACT: Languages have differences in orthographic and phonetic representations i.e. words are not pronounced as they are represented orthographically.  These transitions are normally governed by some underlying phonological rules.  These rules are mostly language specific.  This paper discusses the phonological rules of various languages.  Moreover, it identifies similar rules for Urdu language.

"Prosody in Urdu Poetry - A Phonological Approach" by Syeda Sara Hussain. [Download]
ABSTRACT: In Urdu, written poetry and prosody bear the same relation as that present between poetry and poetic beauty. Prosody is the phonetic reflection of the textual verse. As in Urdu prose, poetry also inherits similar quantity sensitive nature, where moraic weights define verses. In poetry however, word boundary does not necessarily mark syllable division. Thus a verse is an amalgam of words with their phonetic content altered. Prosody dictates most of these alterations. A particular text of an Urdu verse can form various phonetic interpretations. This paper aims to uncover how this variant phonetic information is mapped to invariant phonetic tunes defined by prosody.

"Nicknaming Patterns in Urdu Language"  by Muhammad Jamil Anwar. [Download]
ABSTRACT: This work on nicknaming patterns involves the study of the nicknames formed out of the names of Urdu Language.  It further checks the possible factors like syllabification, sonority, stress, gemination, intensity, formant frequencies and so on, that helps in the formation of a nickname.   In addition to that the rules of phonology are also used in forming a nickname.   In the end an algorithm is established based on the facts revealed from this research that generates a nickname out of a name given to it. 

"Phonological Analysis of Nick Names in Urdu " by Khurrem Shahzad Samad.  [Download]
ABSTRACT: This paper relates a mapping from a given name structure to its possible nicknames syllable template depending upon the syllable structure of a name. The names are categorized depending upon the number of syllables in name and the characteristics of first syllable. The focus in this paper are only those nicknames, which have connection with the name, however a passing remark is also made to the nicknames that do not have any connection with their respective names. Furthermore, three rules are formulated, which can be applied to names with different syllable templates.

"Contextual Shape Analysis of Nastaliq"  by Aamir Wali, Atif Gulzar, Ayesha Zia, Muhammad Ahmad Ghazali, Muhammad Irfan Rafiq, Muhammad Saqib Niaz, Sara Hussain, and Sheraz Bashir.  [Download]
ABSTRACT: Nastaliq calligraphic style is one of the most complex and widely used styles of Urdu script. It employs different shapes and sizes for the same letter in a bewildering variety of contexts. It is observed that these different shapes vary with neighboring letters as well as position of that letter in a ligature. This paper explores this variety in shapes that Nastalique offers, thus providing a foundation to eventually model this inherent variety and recreate this script font as written by a calligrapher.

"Features for Noori Nastalique"  by Aamir Wali, Atif Gulzar, Ayesha Zia, Muhammad Ahmad Ghazali, Muhammad Irfan Rafiq, Muhammad Saqib Niaz, Sara Hussain, and Sheraz Bashir.  [Download]
ABSTRACT: Most of the scripts existing today consist of huge inventory of characters. All characters have certain features that help perceive them differently from one another. Noori Nastalique script, like all other scripts, extracts certain characteristic features defined in both visual and articulatory terms.  This paper uncovers these features and analyzes them.

"Vowel Insertion Grammar Muhammad" by Khurram Riaz, Muhammad Mustafa Rafique, Syed Raza Shahid. [Download]
ABSTRACT: In Urdu language the position of vowels within the syllable is highly considerable issue. This paper contains vowel insertion grammar for Urdu language. The grammar is presented in the form of an automaton. The presented automaton was tested successfully on many words of Urdu language. The tested words were supposed to have all the diacritics correctly marked on them. The following vowel insertion grammar is extremely useful for building speech synthesis for Urdu language.