Saraiki (draft)

Letters

Combining marks

Numbers

Punctuation

Other

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	labio- dental	alveolar	retroflex	palatal	velar	uvular	glottal
stop	p b		t d	ʈ ɖ	t͡ʃ d͡ʒ	k ɡ	q	ʔ
	pʰ bʰ		tʰ dʰ	ʈʰ ɖʰ	t͡ʃʰ d͡ʒʰ	kʰ ɡʰ
implosive	ɓ		ɗ		ʄ	ɠ
fricative		f v vʰ	s z		ʃ	x ɣ		ɦ
nasal	m		n	ɳ	ɲ	ŋ
	mʰ		nʰ	ɳʰ
approximant, trill, flap			r l	ɽ	j
			rʰ lʰ	ɽʰ

Tone

Saraiki is not a tonal language.

Structure

tbd

Vowel summary table

The following table summarises the main vowel to character assignments.

Vowel diacritics are shown in this table; in normal text these diacritics do not appear. The hyphens on the IPA show whether this is an initial (-x), medial (-x-), or final (x-) form. It's not clear how to represent the sound ɛ.

For additional details see vowel_mappings.

Post-consonant vowels

In normal text, the Saraiki abjad indicates the location of 5 out of 9 vowel sounds using 4 letters. Four more sounds are not normally written. Since two of the letters also serve as consonants, the orthography relies heavily on the reader for disambiguation of sounds in a word. 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, except for e, which has a different shape and code point when word-final.

Standalone vowels

Word-initial standalone vowels in Saraiki begin with the vowel carrier ا, apart from aː, which is written using آ.

Vowels that are only distinguished by diacritics are not distinguished in normal text, and there is a great deal of phonological ambiguity in these spellings. Examples follow:

اکی

ابھا

اڄ

او

اے

آنا

Word-medial standalones appear to be indicated using a letter with hamza above. The following are examples found in the Wiktionary term list.

ٻئیٹھ

وتاؤں

ترائے

Vowel sounds to characters

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 letters used for the basic set of consonant sounds in native Saraiki.

The ijam for implosives and retroflexes are used in a consistent way. Vertical, double dots below identify implosives, and a small, superscript TAH is used to indicate a retroflex (resulting in both being used for ᶑ).

Observation: q is not found in the Wiktionary entries. It's not clear from other sources whether this is a native sound or not.

Other consonant letters

Nine more consonant letters are hangovers from the original spellings of loan words that have not been assimilated into the basic Saraiki alphabet.

Aspiration

A large number of Saraiki phones are accompanied by aspiration. Unlike Sindhi, no aspirated sounds are represented by a single character.

The aspirated consonants, listed below, are represented by a digraph with ھ.

In vocalised text, vowel diacritics tend to be placed over the initial consonant letter in the digraph, rather than over the HEH.

Finals

Saraiki doesn't normally use any mark to indicate a consonant without a following vowel. Word-final consonants are apparently not marked even in text with other diacritics.

سڑن

بدل

Consonant clusters

No special mechanisms are used to indicate consonant clusters in normal text; they are simply written as a sequence of characters. However, in text with diacritics ْ may be used.

ہفتہ

ابھرݨ

Note how the vowel killer is attached to the first letter in an aspirated digraph (see the second example just above).

Note also that the shape in the nastaliq style is that of an inverted v, rather than the small circle shape used in Arabic language orthographies. The same code point is used for both, and the difference should be managed by using an appropriate font. The diacritic 065B should never be used for this (it was added to the Unicode Standard to serve as a vowel sign in African languages).

Consonant length

Geminated consonants are not normally marked in text, but in text with diacritics they may be indicated using 0651.

بھڄݨ

نک

Consonant sounds to characters

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 Saraiki, or perhaps because the correct character is not available on the user's keyboard.

Codepoint sequences

Combining marks always follow the base character.

Digits

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

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.

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.

لانگھا

ٻلا

Word boundaries

Words are separated by spaces.

Graphemes

tbd

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

Phrase & section boundaries

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

Some Saraiki 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.

(␣)␣<␣>␣[␣]␣{␣}␣«␣»␣‹␣›

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

Saraiki 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.