Arabic Letter Hamza

Hamza marks a brief closure in the throat.

That consonant is called a glottal stop. Alif can mark a long vowel, while hamza marks the stop. In a word, hamza may stand alone or sit on alif, waw, or yeh: أ, إ, ؤ, ئ. The nearby vowels and the hamza’s position help choose the spelling; the carrier is a spelling support, not a second sound.

Arabic script developed from Nabataean writing. In pre-Islamic inscriptions, alif could represent hamza; early Islamic texts sometimes left it unmarked. Qur'anic manuscripts used colored dots to guide reading, and early Islamic graffiti show developing hamza signs. The familiar sign’s shape is conventionally traced to the Arabic letter called ayn. A Leiden prose manuscript dated 866 CE attests the sign.

Why is hamza sometimes not pronounced?

Pronunciation follows different regional and reading traditions.

Formal Arabic generally retains the stop, while Hijazi and other dialect or recitation traditions may soften, replace, or omit it. An old text without a hamza mark therefore does not, by itself, tell you how its words were pronounced.

Related marks have other jobs in other languages. In Persian and Urdu, hamza-above can mark ezafe, a linking sound between words; in Kashmiri, it can indicate a vowel. These uses do not automatically mark the Arabic glottal stop.