Ng (Arabic letter)

Ngāf or Ṅāf ( or ) is an additional letter of the Arabic script, derived from kāf () with the addition of three dots above the letter. The letter was used in Ottoman Turkish to represent a velar and is still used for when writing Turkic languages.

Usage

In Ottoman Turkish, it represented the velar . An example is the word (, 'sea'). The letter is used or has been used to write in:

• Chagatai
• Kazakh
• Kyrgyz
• Azerbaijani
• Uyghur

It is also used in Moroccan Arabic for .

The Xiao'erjing script variant is used to spell in Sinitic languages such as Mandarin (especially the Lanyin, Zhongyuan and Northeastern dialects) and the Dungan language.

Other characters used to represent

Southeast Asian nga

This letter, derived from (), is used to represent in:

• the Jawi script, for
• Acehnese
• Banjarese
• Kerinci
• Maguindanaon
• Malay
• Minangkabau
• TausÅ«g
• Ternate
• the Pegon script, for
• Javanese
• Sundanese
• Arabic Afrikaans, for Afrikaans historically, called ()

Wolof ngōn

This letter is also derived from . Called (), it is used in the Wolofal alphabet to represent in the Wolof language. Two variants of kāf were also used: as in Turkic, and below.

Sindhi ngāf

Derived from the Perso-Arabic () and called , is used in Sindhi for when written in the Arabic script.

Tamil nga

This letter is also derived from , with three dots inside the descender, to represent in the Arwi script used for Tamil.

See also

• Kāf
• Ghayn
• Gaf
• Ayin
• Gueh, used in Sindhi and Saraiki

References