All Sindhi words end in a vowel, either short or long. Most words that are borrowed into Sindhi from other languages, such as English, will have a vowel inserted after a final consonant, for example |
||||
 |
||||
Nasalized vowels |
||||
If a word ends in a nasalized vowel, the final letter in the word will be |
||||
|
||||
 |
|
hin~ara 'now' | |
syllabified: hin-a-ra NOT: hi-na-ra! |
 |
|
gaan~i 'cow' | |
syllabified: gaan-i NOT: gaa-ni! |
|
||||
Medial consonants |
||||
In the middle of a word, a consonant is also usually followed immediately by a vowel, but there are some exceptions. The consonants  can occur immediately next to another consonant in words like  mardu 'man', and  garmii 'hot',  ggaalhi 'a talk, a matter',  saamhon 'in front of, before',  pankho 'fan'. In these cases you will notice that the first consonant in the sequence does not bear a vowel diacritic, and that is your clue to the pronunciation of consonant without a following vowel. There are also a few words borrowed from Arabic that have retained medial consonant clusters, such as  taxtu 'throne' and  tasviira 'picture'. These words are also written without a vowel diacritic on the first consonant of the medial cluster. |
||||
|
||||
The medial consonant cluster  "n + g"
requires special mention here. Though it is written with the letter sequence "n + g" in the Sindhi Arabic script, this cluster is actually pronounced as "ng + g", with a velar nasal sound, just as the medial nasal consonant of the English word finger. In order to represent the "ng + g" sequence in the transcription system used in
, a tilde symbol (~) is used to separate the "ng" from the "g", as in jhang~gu for  'jungle'. Without the tilde, the letter sequence "ngg" would be ambiguous in its interpretation between "ng + g" (as in 'jungle' ), and "n + gg" (as in
 ). It's interesting to note that the letter sequence "n + gg" actually never occurs in Sindhi, so in principle a transcription with "ngg" would have only one real interpretation: "ng + g". But for the sake of clarity, the tilde is used here to indicate the separation between "ng" and "g". |
||||
"n", but this letter is pronounced as a nasal quality over the vowel and not as a full consonant. A nasalized vowel is always written as the vowel followed by the consonant letter 
"hamzo". The hamzo will be placed following the "n" letter