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Washington University launches Urdu website
Thursday April 14, 2011 10:56:23 AM,
Arun Kumar, IANS
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Washington:
St. Louis based Washington University has launched an Urdu website
featuring for the first time a web-based Nastaliq font that
displays whether or not it is installed on the user's computer.
Called Intermediate Urdu (http://urdu.wustl.edu/) the website is
most useful for people with "a basic knowledge of Urdu or those
who have taken two semester of language course in any university
system," Indian-American principal investigator M. J. Warsi told
IANS.
The beauty of the site is that it utilises web-based Nastaliq font
so that Nastaliq is natively displayed on the site without
requiring the user to download an appropriate font, he said.
"It took us a year and half to complete the project," said Warsi,
a gold medalist from Aligarh Muslim University and a West Bengal
Urdu Academy award holder, who teaches in the department of Asian
and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at the university,
"Intermediate Urdu comprises 16 interactive reading passages with
corresponding audio and English summaries, dynamic online quizzes,
and thirteen video interviews of Urdu scholars," he said
underlining the importance of the site.
"All content is directed towards students at the intermediate
level and preparing them for advanced level proficiency," Warsi
said.
"This work has a great significance for development in the field
of language pedagogy."
"We have plans to make 'Advanced Urdu' and then 'Beginning Urdu'
websites to complete the sequence of Urdu learning," Warsi said.
Featured on the site are among others a speech of Maulana Azad,
Bagh-o-bahaar, Alif Laila.
The website was developed with a grant from the South Asia
Language Resource Centre at the University of Chicago.
Warsi was recently conferred with Hindi- Urdu literary award for
his contribution in the field of Hindi-Urdu language and
linguistics at the 22nd International Hindi-Urdu literary
conference in Lucknow.
(Arun Kumar can
be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)
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