Gujarati Anusvara

It marks a nasal vowel or a nasal consonant.

The anusvar can make a vowel nasal, letting air pass through the nose as you pronounce it. Before a stop consonant—a sound made by briefly blocking airflow—it represents a nasal made at the same mouth position. Read the neighboring letters rather than giving the dot a fixed “m,” “n,” or “ng” sound.

Where did Gujarati anusvara come from?

It belongs to an older Indian tradition of nasal signs.

Anusvara appears in Brahmi, an ancient Indian script, in records from Emperor Ashoka's reign in the 3rd century BCE. Gujarati developed from Nagari, another Indian script, beginning in the 10th century. These dates describe the wider tradition and script, not the first appearance of this exact Gujarati dot.

Gujarati writing served bookkeeping and personal correspondence into the mid-19th century. The nasal sign's rules differ across traditions: a 19th-century Sanskrit grammar describes broader manuscript use for a nasal after a vowel. Do not carry a Sanskrit reading into Gujarati without checking the word.