A quick trick for figuring out the gender of words in Urdu

It’s no secret that one of the most difficult parts of the Urdu language is gender. Every word is either male or female, and gender has big implications for how a sentence plays itself out. Unlike Farsi, which doesn’t have grammatical gender at all, and unlike Arabic, where grammatical gender is almost always easily identifiable, gender in Urdu is much more difficult to figure out. Though there are some patterns, ultimately you just end up knowing the gender of a word via gradual osmosis and trial and error.

However - I have figured out a quick trick to know the gender of a word! This works by using possessive pronouns (my, your, our etc.) Unlike in English, which has gender neutral possessive pronouns, in Urdu these change based on the gender of the object they are attached to. Note however that this trick requires knowledge of how to read in Urdu - or at the very least, how to distinguish an alif from a choti ye from a bari ye.

Okay, ready? Just two steps:

First, open Google translate on your phone or computer.

Then write a possessive construction in English; for example, ‘my car’. It should come up on the other end as ‘میری گاڑی' /meri gaari/’.

You can figure out the gender of a word immediately based on which possessive pronoun is used. ‘میری /meri/’ goes with female nouns, so therefore ‘car’ is a female word in Urdu.

Got it? We’re done!

This works pretty much with every noun. Below is an example with ‘my house’. The Urdu says ‘میرا گھر /mera ghar/’ - with ‘میرا /mera/’ being the male possessive pronoun. Therefore, ‘house’ is male in Urdu.

Hope this helped!

-Hamza