Khojki Letter A

It is Khojki’s independent letter for the A vowel. It represents a vowel without a preceding consonant and can begin a syllable.

Khojki A contributes a sound to a written word rather than a separate idea on its own.

How did Khojki develop?

It grew from merchant writing into religious literature.

Khojki grew out of Lohanaki, a merchant script used in Sindh. A recognisable ancestor is described in the eighth century; Khojki manuscripts are attested by the sixteenth century.

Nizari Ismaili tradition links Khojki’s development to the preacher Pir Sadruddin in the fifteenth century; historian Ali Asani describes his role as refining and spreading an existing form. The script adapted merchant writing for ginans (Ismaili devotional hymns and teachings), adding vowel marks, doubled-consonant marks, and word dividers. Khojki recorded Sindhi, Gujarati, Hindi, Punjabi, Siraiki, Persian, and Arabic; outside Sindh, some letters shifted to match local sounds. It belongs to the Brahmi-based Landa family, ultimately derived from Sharada; Gurmukhi developed in parallel as literary writing for Sikh tradition. By the 1970s, Khojki had fallen out of general use in many settings as Gujarati and Arabic replaced it.