Sindhi Devanagari Alphabet

Sindhi is the language of Sindh, the lower Indus valley, and it is written in two scripts. In Pakistan, where most Sindhi speakers live, it uses an extended Arabic alphabet of 52 letters, the form standardised under British rule in the 1850s (see the Sindhi collection for it). In India, home to the Sindhi families who left Sindh at Partition in 1947, both that Arabic script and Devanagari are recognised for Sindhi. The Arabic script still fills much of Indian Sindhi literature and journalism, while many younger Sindhis who learned Hindi or Marathi at school find Devanagari easier to read, and it is used in textbooks, books and dictionaries.

Devanagari Sindhi works like Hindi and Marathi. Letters hang from a headline that joins a word together (सिंधी), there are no capital and small letters, and every consonant carries a built-in a: क is ka, म is ma. Other vowels are added as signs called matras: का कि की कु कू के कै को कौ. The ि of कि is written before the consonant although it is said after it. The full vowel letters अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ए ऐ ओ औ start a word or follow another vowel.

What sets the Sindhi alphabet apart is four extra consonants, the implosives ॻ ॼ ॾ ॿ, and the fact that its everyday words end in a vowel. Masculine nouns often end in a short u, which Sindhi writes as a matra where Hindi would end on the bare consonant: ॿारु (child), ॻोठु (village), अॼु (today). Before Arabic and Devanagari, Sindhi traders kept their accounts in local scripts of their own, among them Khudabadi, which entered Unicode in 2014 as Khudawadi.

The four Sindhi implosives: ॻ ॼ ॾ ॿ

Implosives are made by lowering the voice box as the lips or tongue release, so air is drawn inward for a moment instead of pushed out. Sindhi is the best known Indo-Aryan language to have them, and it has four: ॻ (an implosive g), ॼ (j), ॾ (d) and ॿ (b). Each is a separate consonant that changes the word, not a way of saying ग ज ड ब. You hear them in ॿोली (language, as in सिंधी ॿोली), ॿारु (child), ॾाढो (very), अॼु (today) and ॻोठु (village).

In the alphabet each implosive comes right after the plain voiced letter of its row: ग ॻ घ, ज ॼ झ, ड ॾ ढ, ब ॿ भ. In the Arabic script the same four sounds are ڳ ڄ ڏ ٻ, so ڳ is ॻ, ڄ is ॼ, ڏ is ॾ and ٻ is ॿ, which helps when you read a family letter or a book printed in Sindh.

Older Devanagari Sindhi, and some handwritten and typed texts, mark the implosives with a short bar fused to the consonant. The Vedic anudatta ॒ (U+0952) is a distinct mark; Unicode used it as a stand-in in older text. In 2006 Unicode 5.0 gave the four implosives letters of their own, ॻ U+097B, ॼ U+097C, ॾ U+097E and ॿ U+097F, and to a computer ग॒ and ॻ are different strings: a search for one will not find the other. If your text mixes the legacy sequences with these letters, use the single Sindhi letters throughout; Unicode no longer recommends the older sequences.

Nasals, ड़ and the nukta letters in Sindhi

Sindhi has five nasal consonants, all of them in everyday words: म न and the retroflex ण as in पाणी (water), and also ङ and ञ, which Hindi keeps mostly for Sanskrit spellings. In the Arabic script they are ڱ and ڃ. The anusvara ं marks a nasal sound before a consonant, as in सिंधी, and the virama ् removes the built-in a so that consonants join: स् + त = स्त.

The nukta ़ is the dot under a letter. Under ड it writes Sindhi's flapped r, ڙ in the Arabic script: घोड़ो (horse). Under ख ग ज फ क it writes sounds of words from Persian and Arabic, as in ख़बर (news) and ज़मीन (land). Many writers drop these dots in casual text. Typed text often stores ज़ as two characters, ज followed by ़, and it looks the same as the single character.

The half-moon signs ॅ and ॉ write the vowels of English words, as in डॉक्टर (doctor); ृ appears in Sanskrit words such as कृष्ण, and ॄ is found almost only in grammar charts. Sentences end with the danda । or a full stop, ॥ closes a verse in hymns, and numbers are written either with Devanagari digits ० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९ or, more often today, with 0–9. Prices take the Indian rupee sign ₹.

How to type Sindhi in Devanagari

Keyboards labelled "Sindhi" for Windows, Mac and phones are often made for the Arabic script. For Devanagari Sindhi, a Hindi or Marathi Devanagari keyboard gives you nearly everything: on Windows add Hindi under Settings → Time & language → Language & region and pick Hindi Traditional (InScript) or Hindi Phonetic; on a Mac add Hindi under System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources; on a phone add Hindi in Gboard, SwiftKey or the iPhone keyboard settings. Some phone keyboards also list a Sindhi (Devanagari) layout; check yours before you settle for Hindi.

Many Hindi layouts have no key for the four implosives, so type them by code. In Microsoft Word type 097B and press Alt + X for ॻ (097C ॼ, 097E ॾ, 097F ॿ). On Linux press Ctrl + Shift + U, type the code and press Space. On a Mac open the Character Viewer with Control + Command + Space and search for "Devanagari letter bba". In HTML write ॻ ॼ ॾ ॿ. On a phone the quickest way is to copy them from the grid above once and save them as text replacements (iPhone: Settings → General → Keyboard → Text Replacement).

If ॻ ॼ ॾ ॿ show as empty boxes, the font predates them; Noto Sans Devanagari and other current Devanagari fonts include them. The danda is ।, ॥ is ॥ and ₹ is ₹ in HTML; please use the real danda । rather than the vertical bar |, which search and screen readers treat as a different character.

Where Sindhi is written in Devanagari: Sindhis in India

Devanagari Sindhi belongs to India's Sindhi community. CLDR estimates about 2 million Sindhi users in India, against roughly 41 million Sindhi speakers in all, most of them in Sindh, Pakistan; India's 2011 census counted about 2.8 million people with Sindhi as their mother tongue. No Indian state is Sindhi-speaking as a whole: after 1947 Sindhi families settled across the country, above all in Gujarat (Ahmedabad, and Gandhidham and Adipur in Kutch, towns built for them), Maharashtra (Ulhasnagar near Mumbai, which grew out of a camp for Sindhi refugees, Mumbai and Pune), Rajasthan (Ajmer, Jaipur), Madhya Pradesh (Bhopal, Indore), Chhattisgarh and Delhi.

Sindhi became one of the languages of the Eighth Schedule of India's constitution in 1967, through the Twenty-first Amendment, though it is not the official language of any state. The community's great festival is Cheti Chand, the Sindhi New Year in the month of Cheti (Chaitra, around March or April), the birthday of Jhulelal, the patron saint of the Indus, who is pictured riding a palla fish 🐟 on the river 🌊. Families carry a lamp 🪔 and offerings to a river or the sea, and the cry is आयो लाल झूलेलाल.

Related pages: the Sindhi collection for the Arabic-script alphabet, and the Devanagari alphabets of Hindi and Marathi, which share almost every letter here except the implosives; Gujarati and Punjabi are the neighbouring languages of many Indian Sindhi towns. The country pages for India 🇮🇳 and Pakistan 🇵🇰 collect their flags and symbols.