The standardized Pakistani keyboard layout for Urdu phonetically maps the Urdu alphabet onto the QWERTY keyboard. This mapping is imperfect, in no small part because there are more letters in Urdu than in English.

The QWERTY keyboard is designed with the Latin script in mind. The Shift key was used to type uppercase characters. But despite the physical limitations of typewriters being in the past, on iOS a Shift key is still needed to access all Urdu letters.

But what is perhaps more worrying is how difficult this arrangement is for Urdu speakers learning to type for the first time. Current keyboards assume that Urdu speakers must first build familiarity with English computing, before they can make sense of computers in Urdu. This is one in a series of compromises made in the history of computing, typewriting, and printing in Urdu, other languages in the Arabic script, and non-Latin languages broadly.

In addition, millions of Urdu speakers do not count Urdu as their mother tongue. Regional languages in South Asia that use the Arabic Script, such as Pashto, Sindhi, Balochi and Panjabi, are even more under-represented than Urdu in the digital sphere. Most multilingual people end up having to find workarounds – such as using an Urdu keyboard with other letters tacked on in shift or hold interactions.

The result of all these compromises is an inescapable belief that English is the language of computing, implying that Urdu will never be sufficient for computing. Of course the reality is that computing is not sufficient for Urdu. This project aims to change our perception of technology, and its relationship to our culture. Our transparent efforts to build our language model engage our community. Together, we can build new technology that better understands our history and culture.

Most Urdu speakers have never typed very much at all, especially not in Urdu. Making a keyboard layout understandable is critical to enable effective text production. As millions of Urdu speakers come online for the first time, it is imperative that we build the infrastructure to better represent their culture on the internet without compromises.

We didn’t just do the work of building Makhzan, we also open-sourced it. It is our belief that the development of Urdu technology will be catalyzed by a shared set of resources between Urdu writers, publishers, technologists, and language researchers. An open-sourced repository allows us to work together with collaborators across the best institutions in the world to build a collective understanding of the Urdu language.

While large technology companies often do a valiant job of serving the world's languages, they are not best positioned to preserve the cultures built into the language. Instead deferring to companies in the West only re-emphasizes a dependency that causes the world's languages to lose more of themselves to technology.

Matnsaz is built from the ground-up with the goal of allowing the community to contribute to and engage with the language models that underpin the keyboard.

A growing body of research showcases that biases encoded in artificial intelligence can manifest in ugly ways. It has also been shown that suggestions from artificial intelligence can influence human behavior. The preservation of a language requires careful curation of the materials used to power its autocorrect and autocomplete technologies – so as to preserve the essential features of the language without encoding unwanted bias.