The distinctive features of Sindhi morphology (Trumpp Beg Khubchandani, pp. As in other New Indo-Aryan languages, educated urban speech is importantly distinguished by the frequency and careful pronunciation of Persian loans from uneducated and rural speech (Bughio, pp. The semantic patterns of Persian loanwords (here transcribed with the Indo-Persian vowels a ā i ī u ū ē ai ō au) in Sindhi are similar to those described elsewhere with particular reference to Urdu (see INDIA xv). Since the full set of Perso-Arabic letters is also maintained to indicate the historical spellings of loanwords, the Sindhi alphabet contains the large total of 52 letters. Sindhi lacks the Urdu device of indicating nasalization by omitting the dot over final nun, but exceptionally marks nasalized vowels by tanwin below mim for mēn “in,” even below hamza for ain “and’.
For other sets in the complex consonantal inventory, various patterns of dots are also used to distinguish the Sindhi implosives ḇ j̱ ḏ g̱, the retroflex consonants t’ d’ r’, and the phonemic nasals ń ñ while the retroflex nasal ń is written with asmall ṭ over nun.
Digraphs with - h are used only for jh and gh, with other aspirated sounds being indicated by single consonants with added dots, or in the case of k and kh by the use of different styles of kāf. 634-36), a specialized adaptation of the Perso-Arabic script standardized by the British in 1853, which differs from standard Urdu nastaʿliq both in its nasḵ style and in many graphic forms. The distinctiveness of Sindhi is emphasized by its script (Khubchandani, pp. While it was the Arab conquest of Sindh in the 8th century which made it the first area of the subcontinent to come under Muslim rule, it is the subsequent prolonged use of Persian, the main administrative and cultural language of the region down to the British conquest of 1843, which principally accounts for the large number of Persian (including Perso-Arabic) loanwords which have been absorbed by Sindhi. More general areal features, such as the use of suffixed pronouns with nominal and prepositional forms as well as verbs, underline its position on the frontier of Indo-Aryan with Iranian. Many of its numerous distinctive features may be attributed to the isolated position in the lower Indus valley of Sindh (< sindhu “Indus”), the spelling now officially preferred to the Persian-style “Sind.” These features include some distinctive historical innovations, like the four voiced implosives here transcribed as ḇ j̱ ḏ g̱ (Turner 1924a, 1924b), as well as many conservative preservations, including many grammatical inflections as well as the final short vowels (usually pronounced as whispered vowels) which have been lost in most New Indo-Aryan languages. SINDHI, a language of the Indo-Aryan family.
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