Write the way they speak in the bazaar.
There are Urdu websites. There are English websites. In Roman Urdu — very few. Yet all of Pakistan's business runs on WhatsApp in exactly this: "need lawn kurtay, tell me the rate, send a sample." Rabta is built in the language the deal happens in.
Urdu is the world's 10th largest language — and most of it is typed in Roman letters.
The point is clear: someone who is put off by a long piece of Urdu text or an English website will still type "bhai rate kya hai" in Roman on WhatsApp. Rabta treats that as its language.
More than half write in Roman letters.
A 2023 study by the University of Education, Lahore (9 campuses, postgraduate users): the style of writing in digital spaces.
And the choice of language (same study):
These are educated university users. In the bazaar — where Rabta works — the share of Roman Urdu is far higher, because English is not even an option there.
Three kinds of websites. One empty space.
Urdu script websites
Newspapers, government, religious. You need to know the script to read — and a separate keyboard to type. The bazaar person doesn't write here.
English websites
Corporate, e-commerce, banks. Formal English — "Request for Quotation", "Minimum Order Quantity". Understandable, but it doesn't feel like yours.
Roman Urdu websites
Very few — yet it is the most used on WhatsApp, SMS and social media. "Rate kya hai", "MOQ kitna", "sample bhejo". Rabta is one of the few websites built in exactly this.
Even Google accepted it: people type in Roman.
In 2017 Google added "Roman Urdu to Urdu" transliteration to the Gboard keyboard — because Pakistani users typed in Roman letters instead of Urdu script. The world's biggest tech company changed its keyboard to fit this habit. Rabta changed its whole website.
- No new keyboard to learn — type the way you type on WhatsApp.
- One language — bazaar, website, chatbot, guide, all the same.
- Roman Urdu — every page, every button, every answer.
Your language. Your bazaar.
No form, no English. Write "Salam Rabta" on WhatsApp — we handle the rest.
Write Salam RabtaSources: Ethnologue via Wikipedia — Urdu (246M total, 10th most spoken; Pakistan L2 164M / 77%) · Frontiers in Education, 2023 — Digital Pakistan: language use on social media (50.8% Romanized letters; 37.7% / 34.4% / 20%) · Population & Housing Census 2023 (literacy 60.65%) · Dawn, 2017 — Gboard Roman Urdu to Urdu · WhatsApp users: DataReportal Digital 2026 Pakistan.