School writing class
Chitral, Pakistan
A white-washed board serves as a pratice paper for learning how to write. Urdu -- what the boy is writing -- goes right to left, like Arabic, in wonderful cursive waves. In this school there are no desks, no books. Only a swept place on the ground beneath the shade of a tree in a courtyard.
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Ashfaq writes:
The script in the photo is Urdu, not Arabic. It has all the alphabets of Arabic and some more. Sounds like 'P' are unavailable in Arabic, but available in Urdu. Also, when someone speaks Urdu, it sounds more like Hindi (the Indian national language) than Arabic
Sandy Sneddon writes:
In many parts of Pakistan schoolchildren coat their wooden writing tablets with mud to prepare the surface for writing. On the afternoons in places like Chitral you can see children on the way home from school washing the mud off in irrigation channels or other running water. The boy is writing Urdu in Persian script - similar to Arabic, but with its own distinctive shape.
Tom Powell writes:
Urdu is practically the same language as Hindi - they differ mainly in script, which is why, for example, many Pakistani Urdu speakers will understand things like Bollywood films etc. In Chitral, I believe there are projects to make sure that children are taught both Urdu and English. This is to help with trade etc. And Urdu is written in a script called Nastaliq, qhich is different to Farsi and Arabic.