Arabic Tone Two Dots Below

It marks a long falling tone in Rohingya. In Fonna, Rohingya’s Arabic-script writing, thela is a two-dot sign placed outside a vowel sign; this below form follows a vowel sign placed below its consonant. The dots mark the vowel’s tone, not a change to the consonant.

Rohingya uses tone signs because Arabic script without them does not show all the language’s sounds clearly. The dots’ tone value belongs to this Rohingya spelling system; the same shape is not a general tone instruction in Arabic, Persian, or Urdu.

Where did the mark come from?

Hla Aung’s 2001 Rohingya Readers No. 2 and No. 3 show the sign in teaching books; they document its use by then, not who invented it.

The Arabic-script spelling adapted older Arabic and Urdu conventions, then added Rohingya-specific vowels and tone signs. In the 1980s, Hanifi Rohingya was designed as a separate script for the same language. Rohingyalish writes Rohingya in Latin letters, using accents or doubled vowels for tone.

How should it sit in a word?

Place it after the vowel sign, outside the vowel layer. If the vowel is above the consonant, the tone mark belongs above that vowel; if the vowel is below, this character belongs below it. It has no tone reading by itself, without a vowel sign.

When typing a Rohingya word, enter the consonant, vowel sign, then this tone mark. A Rohingya Arabic keyboard layout can provide it, but the sequence still follows the vowel; it does not attach directly to the consonant.