In urdu, why is ‘alif’ prefixed to some words starting with urdu letter seen…like *ischool, istop, ismart *etc… Is there a rule about it or it comes as a common practice?
Re: ischool
****^ Like why are these words written as اسکول ، اسٹاپ ، اسمارٹ and not سکول , سٹاپ , سمارٹ
Why add *alif *الف in the beginning?
Re: ischool
coz these all words rnt actually from urdu language …these r English words taken as it is in urdu language …so will b written the same way as they pronounce in english … 
Re: ischool
School is pronounced as iskool in English?
Re: ischool
I once presented on this subject. let me see if I can find that presentation and give you some references.
Here you go.
“The distribution of consonant clusters is different in many subvarieties: for instance, sk-, sl-, st- do not occur in initial position in several languages of north India and Pakistan (e.g. Urdu). In such varieties of English, school, station, student, store and speech are pronounced with an epenthetic vowel…” (Kashru, 2005:p.45).
“For Hindi/Urdu speakers initial consonant clusters are difficult and may be pronounced with a pre-posed vowel so that school becomes /ɪskul/, station, /ɪsteʃan/ and speech /ɪspitʃ/”.
(Gramley & Patzold, 2003)
“…speakers of Punjabi have difficulty with such initial consonant clusters as /sk, sp/ (saying ‘səport’ and ‘səkool’ for sport and school); Urdu speakers also have difficulty with initial consonant clusters (saying ‘isport’ and ‘iskool’ for sport and school)”.
(McArthur, 1998)
Re: ischool
Interesting BM..but if pronunciation is the main reason, then how come they can say sakoon,supari, Sakeena etc correctly? I understand that when I write these in roman English they are not a cluster of consonants but a combo of cons+vowel but when spoken in urdu they have the same pronunciation as school, special etc or is it different? 
Re: ischool
its different maasi.
the problem is with s+voiceless plossive consonant clusters. if you say sakoon it will be phonemically transcribed as 'səku:n' and there is a "shwa" vowel sound between s and k.
when s is followed by any of the voiceless plossives "p, t, k" without any vowel sound between them, then the problem arises. e.g. in squad "skwɒd ". here you can see that s is followed by "k" without a vowel sound between them.
this is exactly what people with Punjabi as first langauge do. Instead of putting initial vowel sound - like urdu speakers "iskwɒd" - they put an unstressed vowel sound between s and k and make it "səkwɒd".
Re: ischool
BTW, this is one of the examples of first language (L1) interference in Second Language acquisition (SLA).