Diacritics and short vowels

The small marks above and below the line that fix a reading — and the texts in which you actually meet them.

Arabic writes its consonants and its long vowels with letters. The short vowels — the a, i, and u sounds that English writes as ordinary letters — are written, when they are written at all, as small marks above and below the consonants. These marks are called the tashkiil, the "vocalisation," and they are central to what makes Arabic visually distinct from a Latin-alphabet language. They are also, most of the time, absent. A literate adult reading a newspaper does not need them. The system was designed on the assumption that the reader knows the language well enough to supply the vowels mentally.

The three short vowels

The names are mnemonic. FatHa means "opening" — your mouth opens to make an a. Kasra means "breaking" — your jaw drops a little. Damma means "rounding" — your lips round for a u. The marks themselves are visually consistent: above for the back-of-the-mouth vowels (a and u), below for the front vowel (i).

Sukuun and shadda

Two further marks are part of the basic system. The sukuun — a small circle above the letter — explicitly marks the absence of a vowel. It says "this consonant is not followed by a vowel; it is the close of a syllable." The shadda — a small w-shaped mark above the letter — marks doubling. A consonant with a shadda is pronounced twice, or, more precisely, held twice as long. The difference between a single and a doubled consonant is phonemic in Arabic: دَرَسَ darasa means "he studied" and دَرَّسَ darrasa means "he taught." A shadda routinely combines with a vowel mark, sitting alongside it on the same letter.

Tanwiin: the doubled vowel marks

Classical Arabic has a case system, and an indefinite noun in any of the three cases takes a special ending: -an, -in, or -un. These endings are written with doubled vowel marks — fatHa-tanwiin, kasra-tanwiin, Damma-tanwiin — placed on the last letter of the word. They are most often heard and seen in formal Modern Standard Arabic; spoken dialects largely drop them.

Taa marbuuTa

The taa marbuuTa, "tied taa," is a special letter that appears only at the end of a word: ة. It is the standard mark of the feminine ending. Visually it looks like a haa (ه) with the two dots of a taa above it, and that is precisely what it is — a hybrid of the two letters. Pronounced as a t when followed by a case ending or in formal speech, it surfaces as a simple -a in pause and in most spoken contexts. So مَدْرَسَة is read as madrasa in everyday speech and madrasatun in fully vocalised formal reading.

Madda

The madda is a small wavy line over an alif: آ. It marks a long aa at the start of a word, and is what would otherwise have been written as two consecutive alifs. The most familiar word that begins this way is آدَم aadam, "Adam," and any borrowed name beginning with a long a (آسِيَا aasiyaa, "Asia") will use it.

The hamza diacritics

The hamza, ء, is the glottal stop. It is a real consonant of Arabic, but orthographically it does not connect and does not have its own slot in the letter grid. Instead it sits on a "seat" — the choice of which is governed by the surrounding vowels — or, less often, on the line by itself. The four common spellings are:

The rules that decide which seat the hamza takes are intricate and have a reputation. Native speakers learn them at school and adults still consult dictionaries. As a learner you absorb common spellings — سُؤَال su'aal "question," شَيْء shay' "thing," قَائِم qaa'im "standing" — before you understand the system that produces them.

Where you actually see vocalisation

Diacritics are obligatory in four contexts: the Quran, in any printed copy and in any recitation aid; books for children who are still learning to read; teaching materials for non-native learners of Arabic; and dictionaries, where they disambiguate the headword. Outside those contexts you will essentially never see a fully vocalised text. Newspapers, novels, signage, social media, business letters, contracts, government forms — all run unvocalised. The skilled reader supplies the missing vowels from context, from the recognisable patterns of the verbal and nominal morphology, and from knowing the language. (See roots and patterns for why this is not as crazy as it sounds.)

One more thing worth knowing: even unvocalised text occasionally drops a single diacritic in to disambiguate. A shadda, for instance, may be marked on a verb where leaving it off would create a real reading ambiguity, even when no other vowel marks are written. Treat the diacritics as a graded resource: the writer chooses how much to give the reader.