Shahmukhi (, ) is a Perso-Arabic alphabet script used historically by Punjabi Muslims (primarily in present-day Pakistani Punjab) to write the

Punjabi language Punjabi (; ; , ), sometimes spelled Panjabi, is an Indo-Aryan language of the Punjab region of Pakistan and India. It has approximately 113 million native speakers. Punjabi is the most widely-spoken first language in Pakistan, with 80.5 ...

. It is generally written in the Nastaʿlīq

calligraphic Calligraphy (from el, link=y, καλλιγραφία) is a visual art related to writing. It is the design and execution of lettering with a pen, ink brush, or other writing instrument. Contemporary calligraphic practice can be defined as ...

hand, which is also used for

Urdu Urdu (;"Urdu"
'' Pakistani Punjab as the official script for writing Punjabi. Perso-Arabic is one of two scripts used for Punjabi, the other being

Gurmukhi Gurmukhī ( pa, ਗੁਰਮੁਖੀ, , Shahmukhi: ) is an abugida developed from the Laṇḍā scripts, standardized and used by the second Sikh guru, Guru Angad (1504–1552). It is used by Punjabi Sikhs to write the language, commonly ...

, used by Sikhs and

Hindus Hindus (; ) are people who religiously adhere to Hinduism. Jeffery D. Long (2007), A Vision for Hinduism, IB Tauris, , pages 35–37 Historically, the term has also been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for ...

Indian Punjab Punjab (; ) is a state in northern India. Forming part of the larger Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent, the state is bordered by the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh to the north and northeast, Haryana to the south and southeast, and ...

. Shahmukhi is written from right to left, while Gurmukhi is written from left to right. It is also used as the main alphabet to write Pahari–Pothwari in Azad Kashmir and Jammu and Kashmir. The Shahmukhi alphabet was first used by the Sufi poets of

Punjab Punjab (; Punjabi: پنجاب ; ਪੰਜਾਬ ; ; also romanised as ''Panjāb'' or ''Panj-Āb'') is a geopolitical, cultural, and historical region in South Asia, specifically in the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, comprising a ...

, and became the conventional writing style for the Muslim populace of the

Pakistan Pakistan ( ur, ), officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan ( ur, , label=none), is a country in South Asia. It is the world's fifth-most populous country, with a population of almost 243 million people, and has the world's second-lar ...

i province of

following the Partition of India, while the largely

Hindu Hindus (; ) are people who religiously adhere to Hinduism. Jeffery D. Long (2007), A Vision for Hinduism, IB Tauris, , pages 35–37 Historically, the term has also been used as a geographical, cultural, and later religious identifier for ...

and Sikh modern-day state of

Punjab, India Punjab (; ) is a state in northern India. Forming part of the larger Punjab region of the Indian subcontinent, the state is bordered by the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh to the north and northeast, Haryana to the south and southeast, and ...

adopted the

or seldom, the

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ...

scripts to record the Punjabi language. Shahmukhi script is a modified version of the Arabic script. It was introduced by the Muslim Sufi poets in the 12th century for Punjabi language. While it is virtually identical to the Urdu alphabet, it is sometimes considered as a superset when additional letters are attempted to be included, representing Punjabi phonology; hence all Urdu readers can naturally read Shahmukhi (and vice versa) without any practical difficulty. For writing Saraiki, an extended Shahmukhi is used that includes 4 additional letters for the implosive consonants ().

History

The name 'Shahmukhi' is a recent coinage, imitating its counterpart 'Gurmukhi'. However, the writing of Punjabi in the Perso-Arabic script is well-attested from the 12th century onwards. According to Dhavan, Punjabi began to adopt the script as a "side effect" of educational practices in Mughal-era

, when Punjabi Muslims learned the

Persian language Persian (), also known by its endonym Farsi (, ', ), is a Western Iranian language belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subdivision of the Indo-European languages. Persian is a pluricentric language predominantly spoken a ...

in order to participate in Mughal society. Educational materials taught Persian to Punjabi speakers by using Punjabi written in Persian's alphabet, which was a novel innovation. This was one of the first attempts in writing and standardising the Punjabi language; prior to this, Punjabi was primarily a spoken language, not formally taught in schools. Shackle suggests that the Gurmukhi script was not favoured by Punjabi Muslims due to its religious (Sikh) connotations.

Alphabet

Vowel diacritics

Though only implied, like Urdu, Shahmukhi also has diacritics, which are implied - a convention retained from the original Arabic script, to express short vowels.

Consonants

No Punjabi words begin with , , or . Words which begin with are exceedingly rare, but some have been documented in Shahmukhi dictionaries such as Iqbal Salahuddin's ''Waddi Punjabi Lughat''. The digraphs of

aspirated consonant In phonetics, aspiration is the strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with t ...

s are as follows. In addition, and form ligatures with : () and ().

Aspirates

* (waddi ye) is only found in the final position, when writing the sounds e (ਏ) or æ (ਐ), and in initial and medial positions, it takes the form of . * Vowels are expressed as follows:

Difference from Persian and Urdu

Shahmukhi has more letters added to the Urdu base to represent sounds not present in Urdu, which already has additional letters added to the Arabic and Persian base itself to represent sounds not present in Arabic. Characters added which differ from Persian but not Urdu include: to represent /ʈ/, to represent /ɖ/, to represent /ɽ/, to represent /◌̃/, and to represent /ɛ:/ or /e:/. Furthermore, a separate do-cashmi- he letter, , exists to denote a /ʰ/ or a /ʱ/, this letter is mainly used as part of the multitude of digraphs, detailed below. Characters added which differ from Urdu include: ࣇ to represent /ɭ/ and ݨ to represent /ɳ/. These characters, however are rarely used.

Loanwords

In Punjabi, there are many Arabic and Persian

loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because t ...

s. These words contain some sounds which were alien to South Asian languages before the influence of Arabic and Persian, and are therefore represented by introducing dots beneath specific Gurmukhi characters. Since the Gurmukhi alphabet is

phonetic Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. ...

, any loanwords which contained pre-existing sounds were more easily transliterated without the need for characters modified with subscript dots. is pronounced 'j' in French or as vion in English is often transliterated in many ways due to its changing sound in various Arabic and Persian words.

Gallery

File:Bulleh Shah poetry example.png, An example of poetry in Shahmukhi by

Bulleh Shah Syed Abdullah Shah Qadri ( pa, ; ; 1680–1757), known popularly as Bulleh Shah ( pa, ; ) and Bulleya, was a Punjabi philosopher and Sufi poet during 17th-century Punjab. His ancestors had migrated from Bukhara (modern-day Uzbekistan) ...

, a prominent Sufi-poet File:Bhulay Shah.jpg, Another example of poetry by Bulleh Shah in Shahmukhi

References

External links

Shahmukhi to Gurmukhi Transliteration System: A Corpus based Approach

Learn Shahmukhi

Kalam-e-Baba Nanak

Punjabi and Punjab

E-Book on Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi

PDF on Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi
{{DEFAULTSORT:Shahmukhi alphabet Arabic alphabets Orthographies by language Punjabi language Arabic alphabets for South Asian languages