The nuqta (, , ; sometimes also spelled nukta, , ), is a diacritic mark that was introduced in Devanagari and some other Indic scripts to represent sounds not present in the original scripts. It takes the form of a dot placed below a character. This idea is inspired from the Arabic script; for example, there are some letters in Urdu that share the same basic shape but differ in the placement of dots(s) or nuqta(s) in the Perso-Arabic script: the letter ù ayn, with the addition of a nuqta on top, becomes the letter ú gÃÂhayn. The word itself means "dot" in Arabic.
The term () is itself an example of the use of the nuqta. Other examples include ; and , a combination of a Türko-Mongolic (ÃÂáÃÂ) and a (kÃÂhÃÂn) honorific.
The nuqta, and the phonological distinction it represents, is sometimes ignored in practice; e.g., being simply spelled as . In the text Dialect Accent Features for Establishing Speaker Identity, Manisha Kulshreshtha and Ramkumar Mathur write, "A few sounds, borrowed from the other languages like Persian and Arabic, are written with a dot (bindu or nuqtÃÂ). Many people who speak Hindi as a second language, especially those who come from rural backgrounds and do not speak conventional Hindi (also called Khaá¹Âëbà Âlë), or speak in one of its dialects, pronounce these sounds as their nearest equivalents." For example, these rural speakers will assimilate the sound ã (Devanagari: à ¤Âà ¤¼; Nastaliq: ) as á (Devanagari: à ¤Â; Nastaliq: ).
With a renewed HindiâÂÂUrdu language contact, many Urdu writers now publish their works in Devanagari editions. Since the Perso-Arabic orthography is preserved in Nastaÿlëq script Urdu orthography, these writers use the nuqta in Devanagari when transcribing these consonants.
Devanagari also includes coverage for the Dravidian consonants /û/; /r/ and /n/. (Respectively, these letters modify /ÃÂ/; /þ/ and /nê/). An example is .
For example, the letters and are used in Devanagari to write the Kashmiri alveolar affricates and respectively.
To represent the Eastern Nagari letter representing /ÃÂ/, the consonant is used in Devanagari.
In Maithili, there are four non-syllabic vowels: iï, uï, eï, oï written in Devanagari as à ¤¯à ¤¼, à ¤µà ¤¼, à ¤¯à ¤¼à ¥Â, à ¤µà ¤¼à ¥Â. But colloquially, these are written without nuqta.
The Bengali-Assamese script has à ¦¡à ¦¼ à ¦¢à ¦¼ à ¦¯à ¦¼, which are variations of à ¦¡ à ¦¢ à ¦¯; however, à ¦¬ and à ¦° are completely different in nature.
In Old Nepali language texts, a nuqta-like diactric is often found on similar glyphs or glyphs that have undergone phonological shifts. There are two use cases found for it:
Sindhi's and Saraiki's implosives are accommodated in Devanagari with a line attached belowâÂÂa diacritical bar: <span style="font-size:14pt;"></span> , <span style="font-size:14pt;"></span> , <span style="font-size:14pt;"></span> , <span style="font-size:14pt;"></span> .
In Tamil script, the special character (, ) is used like nuqta to represent non-native consonants.
In Thaana script of Maldives, one or many nuqtas are added to their native consonants to represent Perso-Arabic consonants, and each phoneme is encoded as a whole in the Unicode block (instead of a separate codepoint for the diacritic).