Arabic letter ddal

Ddal represents Urdu’s voiced retroflex d.

In Urdu, ڈ marks a voiced retroflex d: the tongue curls back as you make the sound. It contrasts with the dental d written د. The extended Arabic script also serves South Asian traditions such as Shahmukhi Punjabi and Pashto, where letters like ddal represent sounds not written with the Arabic and Persian alphabets alone.

South Asian writing traditions adapted Arabic-script letters with a ṭo'e mark for local sounds absent from Arabic and Persian. A Unicode conference paper from 2005 describes this broader adaptation history; it does not establish a first appearance date for ddal.

Why is ddal different from Arabic dāl?

The language determines the sound, not this glyph’s outline.

Arabic dāl د is the ordinary d. In Urdu, ڈ is the retroflex d, while ذ represents z. The same Arabic-script letters can have different sound values across languages, so reading ﮈ as ordinary Arabic dāl misses the Urdu distinction.

Urdu groups ddal with ٹ, the retroflex t, and ڑ, the retroflex r. These letters share the South Asian ṭo'e-mark tradition; each represents a different consonant.

Which form should I type?

Use the base letter ڈ in ordinary Urdu text.

ﮈ is a compatibility presentation form of ڈ: it fixes the letter in its isolated shape. Arabic-script text normally stores the base letter, and writing software chooses the appropriate shape from its position. Use the fixed form only when older data or a specific test requires it.

For regular text, enter ڈ with an Urdu or compatible Arabic-script keyboard. To enter this exact presentation form for a file or test, use your editor’s hexadecimal Unicode input for FB88. Fonts can draw the same letter with different outlines.