𑈛 Khojki letter da

What 𑈛 means

It writes a dental d sound inside Khojki words.

The tongue touches the upper teeth for this consonant; the letter is not a word by itself. Standard transliteration assigns it d and relates it to Sindhi-Arabic د. Historical charts also record an aspirated reading: a d pronounced with a puff of breath.

A 2011 encoding proposal describes Khojki’s development in Sindh for Sindhi and Nizari Ismaili religious literature, especially gināns, or devotional poems. It also records later use for Gujarati, Punjabi, Siraiki, Hindi-related languages, Arabic and Persian. Khojki belongs to the Landa family of South Asian scripts and is historically related to Sharada; Gurmukhi is another Landa script with a religious-literary role. A tradition recorded in the proposal credits Pir Sadruddin and calls Khojki a refined form of Lohānākī. Manuscripts show its use by the 16th century.

Why can this letter sound different?

Regional spelling practices changed some d-series readings.

Scribes outside Sindh sometimes neutralized distinctions found in Sindhi. The proposal also records d-series assignment shifts during a reform in the 1930s.

After 𑈛, the i vowel sign takes a contextual shape. A virama, the mark that suppresses a consonant’s vowel, lets 𑈛 join the next consonant in a cluster such as dra. The base letter and signs remain separate characters in digital text; a box or blank glyph points to a font-coverage problem, not a different letter.

A specialist script: this letter belongs in Khojki text, transliteration, manuscript work or script documentation.

Do not replace it with 𑈖 or 𑈜; the neighboring d letters are distinct.

Drift: Khojki declined in many institutions during the 20th century; a 2021 study reports continued religious-literature use in Sindh and beyond.

Part of the collection

𑆃

Historic Indian Scripts (Sharada, Khojki, Nandinagari …)

Who writes 𑈛

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Don't confuse it with

2

𑈖

Khojki Letter Dda

Khojki letter DDA, a retroflex d pronounced with the tongue curled farther back; 𑈛 is dental.

𑈜

Khojki Letter Ddda

Khojki letter DDDA. Some historical charts overlap its d-series assignment with 𑈛, but it is a separate character.

Combination ideas

2

di: the i vowel sign follows da in its contextual form.

dra: da virama (the mark that suppresses the vowel) ra form a consonant cluster.

Questions people ask

1

Why does 𑈛 show as a box on some devices?

Because that device's fonts have no glyph for it. The character is still correct and still copies correctly — the box is a missing glyph, not a broken character.