Arabic Wavy Hamza Below

It marks the long central vowel /ɨː/. Hold the tongue near the middle of the mouth, keep the lips unrounded, and sustain the vowel.

ٟ is a combining mark: it attaches to a base letter, and its place in the word depends on that letter. By itself, it does not mark a complete vowel.

An alef-initial word uses alef followed by ٟ: اٟ. In تٟر, the mark gives the Kashmiri word for “cold” its long central vowel.

Why does Kashmiri use this mark?

It lets Kashmiri spelling show a long vowel. The mark adds a vowel distinction to letters rather than writing a consonant; the base letter alone does not show this long central sound.

Kashmiri's Arabic-script tradition is reported from the 15th century; that date belongs to the writing tradition, not this mark. A 2009 Unicode proposal reproduces an example from Kashmir University's Ilm-0-Adab magazine and cites a 1973 Kashmiri grammar and a 1985 language course. These references document the orthography before encoding, but do not date this mark's origin.

Unicode recommends alef followed by ٟ instead of the older single character ٳ. The two spellings are not canonically equivalent, so text normalization does not make them interchangeable.

Why does ٟ render differently in some fonts?

A font may be applying Urdu shaping rules.

Orthography notes updated 27 April 2026 report that Noto Nastaliq Urdu needs the text language tagged ks to select Kashmiri shapes. Other fonts may draw the mark with a different contour or spacing.