The Gurmukhi alphabet: 35 akhar and their names

Each letter has a name that repeats its sound, so ਕ is kakka and ਮ is mamma. Children learn the Painti row by row, and that order is still how dictionaries, keyboards and the Character Map arrange the letters.

ੳ, ਅ and ੲ do not stand for consonant sounds. On their own only ਅ is read, as a short "a". The other two exist to hold vowel signs when a word begins with a vowel, because a vowel sign cannot stand by itself:

• ੳ takes the u-sounds: ਉ (u), ਊ (oo), ਓ (o).
• ਅ takes ਆ (aa), ਐ (ai) and ਔ (au), and is a plain ਅ (a) with no sign.
• ੲ takes the i-sounds: ਇ (i), ਈ (ee), ਏ (e).

So ਅਕਾਲ begins with a bare ਅ, ਇਕ begins with ੲ wearing a sihari, and ਓਅੰਕਾਰ begins with ੳ wearing a hora. The vowel signs guide covers each sign in turn.

Rows two to six are organised phonetically, following the ancient Indian arrangement shared with Devanagari and other Brahmi scripts. Each row is one place of articulation, moving from the back of the mouth to the lips:

1. Velar (ਕ ਖ ਗ ਘ ਙ): the back of the tongue against the soft palate.
2. Palatal (ਚ ਛ ਜ ਝ ਞ): the tongue against the hard palate.
3. Retroflex (ਟ ਠ ਡ ਢ ਣ): the tongue curled back to touch the roof of the mouth.
4. Dental (ਤ ਥ ਦ ਧ ਨ): the tongue against the teeth.
5. Labial (ਪ ਫ ਬ ਭ ਮ): the lips.

Within each row the five columns are also fixed: unvoiced, unvoiced aspirated, voiced, voiced aspirated, then the nasal. The seventh row collects the remaining sounds: ਯ, ਰ, ਲ, ਵ and the retroflex flap ੜ, which Gurmukhi has as a letter of its own rather than as a dotted variant of ਡ.

Two letters, ਙ and ਞ, rarely appear on their own in modern Punjabi; the nasal sounds they represent are usually written with tippi or bindi instead. You will still meet them in Gurbani and in older spellings.

Punjabi is a tonal language, which is unusual for the region. The voiced aspirated letters ਘ, ਝ, ਢ, ਧ and ਭ were once pronounced as breathy "gh", "jh", "dh" and "bh" sounds, and that is still how they are transliterated. In modern spoken Punjabi they are instead pronounced like their unaspirated partners with a change in tone: ਘਰ (home) sounds close to "kar" with a low tone, not "ghar". ਹ in the middle or end of a word has a similar tonal effect, which is why ਪਹਾੜ is heard as "pahaar" with a rising tone.

In Gurbani recitation the traditional aspirated pronunciation is usually kept, so a word like ਧਰਮ is read "dharam". Santhiya teachers will tell you which to use.

Punjabi borrowed many words from Persian, Arabic and later English that use sounds the Painti did not cover. To write them, a dot (bindi, ਬਿੰਦੀ) was placed under the nearest existing letter. These five are sometimes called the navin toli, the new group:

In Unicode each one is a base letter plus the combining sign U+0A3C (nukta), although ਸ਼, ਖ਼, ਗ਼, ਜ਼ and ਫ਼ also have precomposed code points. A sixth letter, ਲ਼ (lalla bindi, a retroflex l), exists in Unicode and in some dialect spellings but is not usually counted. The bindi letters do not appear in Sri Guru Granth Sahib Ji, where ਸ is written for both "s" and "sh", so words like ਸਬਦੁ are read without the bindi.

The letters occupy a continuous block from ਅ (U+0A05) to ੜ (U+0A5C), with the vowel carriers at U+0A73 (ੳ) and U+0A72 (ੲ). Every consonant from ਕ (U+0A15) to ਵ (U+0A35) follows the Painti order, which makes sorting and searching Gurmukhi text straightforward. The Character Map lists the code point, the Gurbani Akhar key and the keyboard shortcut for each letter, and copies the letter with one click.