Wiktionary:Punjabi transliteration

These are the rules concerning transliteration in Punjabi entries.

Consonants

• These are tonal consonants. See Wikipdia:Punjabi language for an introduction to tonal sounds in Punjabi.

Nuqta

The nuqta (਼) is used to represent some consonants, often as part of loanwords. The nuqta, however, is not necessarily written:

Vowels

Diacritics

• The ṭippi (ੰ) and bindi (ਂ) indication nasal vowels and nasalization, respectively.
• The addak (ੱ) geminates the following consonant.
• The halant (੍) is rarely used to mark the suppression of the inherent vowel a.
• The visarga (ਃ) makes a voiceless h sound.

Alphabet

The Shahmukhi Script, in essence, is identical to the Urdu script. However, there have been attempts to represent the phonological differences between Urdu and Punjabi through modified consonants, which are mentioned here. Since there is no official transliteration standard for the Shahmukhi script, a modified version of the ALA-LC standard, for Urdu, has been used.

Aspirates

Letters in Shahmukhi are aspirated by adding a 'do-caśme-he' (ھ) to the preceding letter, for instance بھ (bh/ਭ) is a compound of ب (b/ਬ) + ھ (h). In Gurmukhi, it may be represented as ੍ਹ in a minority of words. Diacritics only go on the letters before or after the aspirate.

Hamzah

Diacritics

In the Shahmukhi script, the tradition of not writing diacritics, as followed in Arabic and Persian, has been preserved and is only used to remove ambiguity. Hence, the reader is required to interpret the correct meaning using context.

This can be especially tricky for vowels which represent different sounds depending on the diacritic used or implied before it.

In the Shahmukhi Script, there are 7 diacritics used.

Vowels

Numerals

Shahmukhi numerals are the same as Urdu numerals, which are modified Perso-Arabic numerals.

Users' devices will need to support the Nastaliq font to view the proper numerals as the characters themselves are Persian numerals.