Sindhi

Letters

Combining marks

Numbers

Punctuation

Symbols

Other

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	labio- dental	alveolar	post- alveolar	retroflex	palatal	velar	uvular	glottal
stop	p b		t d			t͡ɕ d͡ʑ	k ɡ	q	ʔ
	pʰ bʰ		tʰ dʰ		ʈʰ ɖʰ	t͡ɕʰ d͡ʑʰ	kʰ ɡʰ
implosive	ɓ		ɗ			ʄ	ɠ
fricative		f	s z		ʂ		x ɣ		h ɦ
nasal	m		n		ɳ	ɲ	ŋ
	mʰ		nʰ		ɳʰ
approximant, trill, flap		ʋ	r l		ɽ	j
			lʰ		ɽʰ

Tone

Sindhi is not a tonal language.

Structure

tbd

Vowel summary table

The following table summarises the main vowel to character assigments.

Vowel diacritics are shown in this table. In normal text these diacritics do not appear. Where I have not yet seen an example, a question mark appears. From right to left, the columns indicate word-initial standalone forms, word-medial standalone forms, and post-consonant forms.

For additional details see vowel_mappings.

Post-consonant vowels

The Sindhi abjad indicates the location of 7 vowel sounds using 4 letters. Three more sounds are not normally written. When needed, all vowels can be unambiguously represented using the letters and 3 combining marks. Post-consonant vowel sounds are written using the same code points, regardless of the position within a word.

Standalone vowels

Standalone vowels are written in 3 different ways in Sindhi. See basicV for the various forms. The following characters are used as vowel carriers.

Vowels that are only distinguished by diacritics are not distinguished in normal text, and the sound represented by the standalone vowel carrier is ambiguous.

Word-initial standalone vowels are written using ا as a vowel carrier.

اتر

اسين

اوڪڻ

اونڪارڻ

Word-medial standalone vowels use ئ as the vowel carrier.

ڏئڻ

سائو

ڳئون

آئون

Word-final standalone vowels ɪ, ʊ, and ə use ء as the vowel carrier.

جوء

جونء

ڀاء

Note how the vowel carrier is used after ن when that represents a nasalisation of the vowel.

ڪانئر

پنئن

Vowel absence

Sindhi doesn't normally use any mark to indicate a consonant cluster or consonant without a following vowel. A cluster is simply written as a sequence of consonants.

Vowelled text may use ْ, but it is rare.

ورسپت

Vowel sounds to characters

This section maps Sindhi vowel sounds to common graphemes in the Arabic orthography.

The left column shows dependent vowels, and the right column independent vowel letters.

Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

Consonant summary table

The following table summarises the main consonant to character assigments.

The left column is lowercase, and the right uppercase.

For additional details see consonant_mappings.

Basic consonants

The following list shows the basic set of consonant letters used for native Sindhi.

Six more consonant letters are hangovers from the original spellings of loan words.

The final and isolated forms of م have a short tail in Sindhi, rather than the long downwards tail in many other orthographies, such as Arabic, Persian, & Urdu.

Aspiration

A number of Sindhi phones are accompanied by aspiration. This is indicated in the orthography in 2 different ways, depending on the base consonant.

The following consonants indicate aspiration by a dedicated glyph:

The other aspirated consonants, listed below, use a digraph with ھ.

Variant forms of heh

Recent discussions in Unicode committees have highlighted how historical limitations of technology have lead to an inconsistent use of code points and glyphs to represent the various forms of heh in Sindhi. An attempt was made by Evanslesd and Mansourkmsd to provide guidelines for correct usage which would promote consistency looking forward.

The scenarios that involve a form of heh are the following:

1. The phoneme h as used for a syllable onset.

   In this case use ه.

   لاهور

2. An aspiration marker following several consonants.

   For this, use ھ.

   پڙھڻ

3. The so-called 'silent heh', which only occurs word-finally, and which generally is either silent or represents a waning breath after a short vowel.

   For this, use ہ.

   بيکہ

The confusion around which code point to use is understandable where the glyph shapes look the same, but it is easy to find examples that don't match the advice of the Unicode experts even where the codepoints used result in a different glyph from that you would expect. The following table shows expected forms when rendered for each code point.

Consonant clusters

No special mechanisms are used to indicate consonant clusters. These are simply written as a sequence of characters.

Consonant sounds to characters

This section maps Sindhi consonant sounds to common graphemes in the Arabic orthography. Sounds listed as 'infrequent' are allophones, or sounds used for foreign words, etc.

The right-hand column shows the various joining forms.

Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

Writing heh

Unicode has a range of code points dedicated to the sound referred to as heh. Some of the code points are separate because they produce different glyphs in positional forms than others; sometimes the difference is semantic. For want of guidelines, and due to historical technological complications, Sindhi users tend to make use of code points in creative ways, typically employing any code point that produces the glyph form they expect to see in a given context.

The inconsistencies produced by this approach hamper search and other machine-based algorithms that deal with the text.

Recently Unicode committees have been considering recommendations for consistent usage which are described in the section heh.

Canonically equivalent encodings

Two letters can be represented as an atomic character (the norm), or as a sequence of base letter plus combining mark. The parts are separated in Unicode Normalisation Form D (NFD), and recomposed in Unicode Normalisation Form C (NFC), so both approaches should be treated as canonically equivalent.

Normally, text will use the atomic form, and this is generally recommended by the Unicode Standard.

Confusables & spelling errors

This table lists characters that are often mistakenly used because they look the same as or similar to the code points used for Sindhi, or perhaps because the correct character is not available on the user's keyboard.

Codepoint sequences

Combining marks always follow the base character.

Digits

Sindhi uses the set of native digits in the Unicode Arabic block known as Eastern Arabic-Indic digits.

The glyph shapes are typically different for 3 of the digits (although not always the same 3 digits) in Persian, Urdu and Sindhi.

Arabic
Persian
Urdu
Sindi

Managing text direction

Unicode provides a set of 10 formatting characters that can be used to control the direction of text when displayed. These characters have no visual form in the rendered text, however text editing applications may have a way to show their location.

202B (RLE), 202A (LRE), and 202C (PDF) are in widespread use to set the base direction of a range of characters. RLE/LRE comes at the start, and PDF at the end of a range of characters for which the base direction is to be set.

In Unicode 6.1, the Unicode Standard added a set of characters which do the same thing but also isolate the content from surrounding characters, in order to avoid spillover effects. They are 2067 (RLI), 2066 (LRI), and 2066 (PDI). The Unicode Standard recommends that these be used instead.

There is also 2068 (FSI), used initially to set the base direction according to the first recognised strongly-directional character.

061C (ALM) is used to produce correct sequencing of numeric data. Follow the link and see expressions for details.

200F (RLM) and 200E (LRM) are invisible characters with strong directional properties that are also sometimes used to produce the correct ordering of text.

For more information about how to use these formatting characters see How to use Unicode controls for bidi text. Note, however, that when writing HTML you should generally use markup rather than these control codes. For information about that, see Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts.

Expressions & sequences

Sequences of numbers are sets of numbers separated by punctuation or spaces, such as 10–12–2022. Sequences of digits, such as 123, in Arabic script text run LTR automatically. Expressions and sequences of numbers follow somewhat complicated rules, which are described in the Arabic language orthography notes.

Cursive script

See type samples.

Arabic script is always cursive, ie. letters in a word are joined up. Fonts need to produce the appropriate joining form for a letter, according to its visual context, but the code point used doesn't change. This results in four different shapes for most letters (including an isolated shape). Ligated forms also join with characters alongside them.

The highlights in the example below show the same letter, ع, with three different joining forms.

Most Arabic script letters join on both sides. A few only join on the right-hand side: this involves 4 basic shapes for Modern Standard Arabic.

ء doesn't join on either side.

Context-based shaping & positioning

In addition to the cursive shaping, Arabic script glyphs also require context-dependent shaping and positioning. For more information, see the Arabic language orthography notes.

The usual mandatory ligature applies for لا.

لاسي

اخلاق

Word boundaries

Words are separated by spaces.

Graphemes

tbd

Phrase, sentence, and section delimiters are described in phrase.

Phrase & section boundaries

Sindhi uses a mixture of ASCII, Arabic, and other punctuation.

The Unicode Standard says that Sindhi uses the reversed comma and semicolon, rather than the Arabic punctuation marks ، and ؛.u16,#G3681 However, it is easy to find text in Sindhi that uses the Arabic punctuation.

Some Sindhi texts use . as a full stop, whereas others use ۔.

Mirrored characters

The words 'left' and 'right' in the Unicode names for parentheses, brackets, and other paired characters should be ignored. LEFT should be read as if it said START, and RIGHT as END. The direction in which the glyphs point will be automatically determined according to the base direction of the text.

The number of characters that are mirrored in this way is around 550, most of which are mathematical symbols. Some are single characters, rather than pairs. The following are some of the more common ones.

(␣)␣<␣>␣[␣]␣{␣}␣«␣»␣‹␣›

Quotations & citations

See type samples.

The following type of quotation mark can be found in Sindhi texts. When quoted text appears within quoted text different characters are used, though usually of the same type. (Of course, depending on ease of input, quotations may also be surrounded by ASCII double and single quote marks.)

Unlike brackets, these quote marks are not mirrored during display. As a result, LEFT means use on the left, and RIGHT means use on the right.

Line breaking & hyphenation

Lines are generally broken between words. They are not broken at the small gaps that appear where a character doesn't join on the left.

General page layout & progression

Sindhi books, magazines, etc., are bound on the right-hand side, and pages progress from right to left.

Columns are vertical but run right-to-left across the page.