The name 'Shahmukhi' is a recent coinage, imitating its counterpart 'Gurmukhī'.[9] However, the writing of Punjabi in the Perso-Arabic script is well-attested from the 17th century onwards.[10] According to Dhavan, Punjabi began to adopt the script as a "side effect" of educational practices in Mughal-era Punjab, when Punjabi Muslims learned the Persian language 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 at standardising the Punjabi language; prior to this, Punjabi was primarily a spoken language, not formally taught in schools.[11]
No Punjabi words begin with ں, ھ, or ے. Words which begin with ڑ are exceedingly rare, but some have been documented in Shahmukhi dictionaries such as Iqbal Salahuddin's Waddi Punjabi Lughat.[19]
The digraphs of aspirated consonants are as follows. In addition, ل and لؕ form ligatures with ا: لا (ـلا) and لؕا (ـلؕا).
Shahmukhi has more letters than its Persian base and related Urdu alphabet, to represent the special sounds that are only in Punjabi, which already have additional letters added to the Arabic base itself to represent sounds not present in Arabic. Characters added which differ from Persian but not Urdu include: ٹ to represent /ʈ/, ڈ to represent /ɖ/, ڑ to represent /ɽ/, ں to represent /◌̃/, and ے to represent /ɛ:/ or /e:/. Furthermore, a separate do-cashmi-he letter, ھ, exists to denote a /ʰ/ or a /ʱ/, this letter is mainly used as part of the multitude of digraphs, detailed above. Characters added which differ from Urdu include: لؕ to represent /ɭ/ and ݨ to represent /ɳ/. These characters, however are seldom used.
Pronunciation
The letter ژ is pronounced 'j' in French or as vision in English and the letter ع is often transliterated in many ways due to its changing sound in various Arabic and Persian words.
Gallery
Modern Shahmukhi alphabet table in Mehr Nastaliq Saraiki font
Standard Shahmukhi alphabets
"Shahmukhi" written in Shahmukhi script
Another example of poetry by Bulleh Shah in Shahmukhi
↑Evans, Lorna Priest; Malik, M.G. Abbas (1 May 2019). "Unicode Proposal for ArLaam"(PDF). Unicode. Punjabi Parchar. Archived(PDF) from the original on 21 April 2020. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
↑Singh Saini, Tejineder; Singh Lehal, Gurpreet; S Kalra, Virinder (August 2008). "Shahmukhi to Gurmukhī Transliteration System". Aclweb.org. Coling 2008 Organizing Committee: 177–180. Archived(PDF) from the original on 14 August 2017. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
12Dhanju, Kawarbir Singh; Lehal, Gurpreet Singh; Saini, Tejinder Singh; Kaur, Arshdeep (October 2015). "Design and Implementation of Shahmukhi Spell Checker"(PDF). Learnpunjabi.org. Archived(PDF) from the original on 21 December 2018. Retrieved 2 May 2020.
↑Malik, Muhammad Ghulam Abbas; Boitet, Christian; Bhattcharyya, Pushpak (27 June 2012) [2010]. "Analysis of Noori Nasta'leeq for Major Pakistani Languages". King AbdulAziz University. Penang, Malaysia. p.4. Archived(PDF) from the original on 15 August 2017. Retrieved 21 April 2020.
↑Dorren, Gaston (2018). Babel: Around the World in Twenty Languages. Profile Books. ISBN978-1782832508.
12Shackle, Christopher (2007). "Panjabi". In Cardona, George; Jain, Dhanesh (eds.). The Indo-Aryan Languages. Routledge. p.655. ISBN978-0-415-77294-5.
↑Dhavan, Purnima (2019-12-31), Green, Nile (ed.), "Marking Boundaries and Building Bridges: Persian Scholarly Networks in Mughal Punjab", The Persianate World, University of California Press, pp.168–169, doi:10.1525/9780520972100-009, ISBN978-0-520-97210-0, S2CID211601323{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
↑"110 new languages are coming to Google Translate". Google. 27 June 2024. Retrieved 6 June 2025. Here are some of the newly supported languages in Google Translate ... Punjabi (Shahmukhi) is the variety of Punjabi written in Perso-Arabic script (Shahmukhi), and is the most spoken language in Pakistan.
↑Bashir, Elena; Conners, Thomas J.; Hefright, Brook (2019). A descriptive grammar of Hindko, Panjabi, and Saraiki. Hefright, Brook. De Gruyter Mouton. pp.62, 77. ISBN978-1-61451-296-7. OCLC1062344143.
↑Bhardwaj, Mangat (2016). Panjabi: A Comprehensive Grammar. Routledge. p.378. ISBN978-1317643265. It is an ancient Arabic writing tradition (carried on in Persian, Urdu and Shahmukhi) to omit the diacritics (except the Hamza) in ordinary writing and to depend on the context to interpret a word.
Mumtaz Ahmad (1 April 1992), Punjabi Reader: in the Arabic Script (in Punjabi), Kensington: Dunwoody Publishing & Press, OL4489455W, WikidataQ113235868
