Nuqta

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Nuqta is a small dot added to letters in Devanagari and some other Indic scripts to represent sounds that aren’t part of the original writing system. It was inspired by the dots used in the Arabic script to distinguish similar-looking letters.

In practice, nuqta lets Devanagari write sounds borrowed from Persian or Arabic. For example, क़िला (qila) means “fortress” and आग़ा खान (Āġā Khān) shows how nuqta marks the q and gh sounds from Urdu. Without the dot, many people would read these as kilā or agha khān.

The use of nuqta varies. Some speakers ignore it and pronounce the words with the closest native Devanagari sounds. Devanagari and related scripts also use nuqta-style marks to represent other non-native sounds or special consonants. Other scripts in the region use similar diacritics or different methods to encode these sounds.