Cham letter final T

It marks the t sound at the end of a Cham syllable.

Cham writes final consonants with dedicated letters. It does not use a virama—a mark that suppresses a consonant’s inherent vowel—to build them by stacking consonants. ꩅ has no inherent vowel. “Final” means the end of a syllable, so it can appear inside a longer word, before the next syllable. A Cham keyboard must enter it as its own letter.

Why does Cham use a separate final letter?

Cham spells syllable-final consonants with their own letters.

Cham writing developed within Indic script traditions derived from Pallava writing, a South Asian script tradition. It was used for Sanskrit before Cham. The oldest surviving Cham text is the Đông Yên Châu inscription, catalogued as C.174 and placed in the 4th–5th century CE. Early stone inscriptions recorded royal victories, temple donations, and religious material.

From the 15th century, handwritten Middle Cham used a cursive form that differed from stone inscriptions. In Cambodia, much of the Islamic manuscript tradition shifted toward writing Malay in Jawi from the mid-19th century, while Cham Imam San communities preserved local Cham-script use. Eastern and Western Cham remain related but differ in spelling conventions and use. Cham writing is also historically connected to neighboring Khmer and Thai traditions through the wider Indic family.