We report on the role of the Urdu grammar in the Parallel Grammar (ParGram) project (Butt et al., 1999; Butt et al., 2002). The ParGram project was designed to use a single grammar development platform and a unified methodology of grammar writing to develop large-scale grammars for typologically different languages. At the beginning of the project, three typologically similar European grammars were implemented. The addition of two Asian languages, Urdu and Japanese, has shown that the basic analysis decisions made for the European languages can be applied to typologically distinct languages. However, the Asian languages required the addition of a small number of new standard analyses to cover constructions and analysis techniques not found in the European languages. With these additional standards, the ParGram project can now be applied to other typologically distinct languages.