Diacritics

What Are Diacritics?

In linguistics, diacritics are marks that are added to letters to clarify how they are pronounced. This can be helpful in languages like Pashto that are written in such a way that the pronunciation of words might not be obvious unless one already knows how to pronounce them. While diacritics are usually not used in common Pashto writing, they can sometimes be seen here and there, and they are very useful in works like dictionaries to eliminate confusion about how to pronounce words.

The Pashto Diacritics

Below are the diacritics of Pashto. Since Pashto is written from right to left, I have similarly arranged the diacritics from right to left below. The colored image shows how I have labeled the letters.

How Do They Work?

These diacritics are basically placed on letters in different ways to show their pronunciations. In the images, the dotted circles are where letters would be placed for each diacritic. To pronounce a letter with a diacritic, the sound of the letter itself is pronounced first, and then the diacritic's sound follows shortly after. (If you are unfamiliar with the alphabets and their sounds, I have a lesson on that.)

Feel free to try out the examples below and guess what they should sound like.