Gurmukhi Alphabet Table

Historically the ancestors of Punjabi had voiced aspirated consonants like gha and bha, and an h between vowels. Over time those consonants faded, and their breath turned into pitch: the syllable now carries a low-rising tone. The spelling never got the memo - you still write the old letter, so a modern reader treats those five letters (and intervocalic h) as tone signs. It is the mirror image of Tibetan, where the whole tone system is predictable from frozen initials; here just five letters do the melodic work.

The nuqta, borrowed with Persian and Arabic vocabulary. Six pairs - sh, kh, gh, z, f and l sounds that Sanskrit-descended Punjabi had no letters for - are written as an existing letter plus two dots above. The names say it plainly: sassē pairī bindī is literally s with two dots above. In everyday text the dots are often dropped and context carries the loan word, which is why learners meet them mainly in Urdu-flavored vocabulary and proper names.

They are carriers, not consonants: ੱ ura, ੲ iri and ਉ a exist so a vowel sign always has a letter to attach to. Indic scripts hang their vowel signs off a consonant, but a word can begin with a bare vowel - so the script provides hook letters. The a-carrier also spells the inherent a, which every consonant secretly ends with unless a sign replaces it.

No - Punjabi has two scripts by community and country: Gurmukhi (from gur-mukh, from the mouth of the Guru) in India, and Shahmukhi, a Persian-Arabic based script, in Pakistan. Gurmukhi is popularly believed to have been standardized by the second Sikh guru, Guru Angad (1504-1552), though scholars trace its antecedents earlier, through the Sharada and Landa merchant scripts of the region. Same language, two wardrobes - and the nuqta dots are where the two traditions shake hands.

Both descend from Brahmi by way of Gupta, but Gurmukhi grew through the Sharada script of Kashmir and hill states, while Devanagari grew through Nagari. You can see the kinship in the varga rows - ka kha ga gha nga reads identically in both - and the divergence in the details: Gurmukhi dropped the top bar, simplified the letters, and, uniquely, turned five of them into tone signs when Punjabi went tonal.