Part of speech (POS) tagging, the assignment of syntactic categories for words in running text, is significant to natural language processing as a preliminary task in applications such as speech processing, information extraction, and others. Urdu language processing presents a challenge due to the dual behaviour of various Urdu POS tags in differing situations (morphosyntactic ambiguity). This paper addresses this challenge by developing a novel tagging approach using linear-chain conditional random fields (CRF). Our work is the first instance of a CRF approach for Urdu POS tagging. The proposed model employs a strong, stable and balanced language-independent as well as language dependent feature set. The language-dependent feature considered includes part-of-speech tag of the previous word and suffix of the current word while the language-independent features includes the ‘context words window’. Our approach was evaluated against support vector machine techniques for Urdu POS—considered as state of the art—on two benchmark datasets. The results show our CRF approach to improve upon the F-measure of prior attempts by 8.3–8.5%.