Dhal ذ

Dhal is the ninth letter of the modern Arabic order, written as the small dal hook carrying a single dot above it. Like dal it joins only to the right, so it ends the connected group it stands in and the following letter begins a new one. Its sound is the voiced dental fricative heard at the start of the English word this, the voiced partner of the sound written by tha. Both are consonants that Arabic preserved where several related languages lost them, and both have merged with other sounds in many spoken dialects while remaining distinct in formal reading and recitation.

Dhal is a sun letter, so the lam of the definite article assimilates to it in speech.

The letter is one of the six rawadif, the six consonants Arabic added to the twenty-two letter sequence it inherited from the older Northwest Semitic alphabets. Its placement records that history exactly. In the modern order, which arranges letters by written shape, dhal stands next to the dal it is built from. In the older abjad order it is not among the twenty-two at all but among the six appended after them, where it carries the numeral value seven hundred. Having no inherited letter behind it, dhal has no Northwest Semitic name, no cognate in the Hebrew, Syriac or Samaritan alphabets whose name can be set beside it, and no reconstructed pictographic sense.

The Arabic script travelled with Islam and was adapted to write languages that share nothing structurally with Arabic. Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, Pashto, Kurdish, Kashmiri, Sindhi, Malay, Hausa, Swahili and many others have all been written in it, and several still are. Every adaptation faced the same problem Arabic itself had faced with the six rawadif: a language has sounds the inherited letters do not distinguish. The solution was the same one, and it is why dhal is a useful letter to consider here. New letters were made by adding dots to existing shapes.

Persian added four, using the dal, ra and jim skeletons and a modified kaf. Urdu went further, adding a set of retroflex consonants marked with a small superscript ta, and a series of aspirated letters written with a special two-eyed ha. Ottoman Turkish, Sindhi and Jawi, the Malay adaptation, each built their own inventories the same way. Sindhi as written in Pakistan uses more than fifty letters, most of them Arabic skeletons under new arrangements of dots.

In West Africa the practice of writing local languages in Arabic script is called Ajami, and it produced a substantial literature in Hausa, Fulfulde, Wolof and Swahili that was long overlooked because colonial scholarship counted literacy in roman letters. Two consequences follow for anyone reading manuscripts. A dotted letter must be read against the conventions of the language and region, not against modern standard Arabic, since the same shape carries different values in different traditions. And the abjad numeral values, which belong to the inherited sequence, do not extend in any settled way to the letters that were invented later.