This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Khowar alphabet" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(October 2017) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Khowar
Khowar written in the Khowar alphabet inNastaliq style.
Script type	Abjad
Period	Early 20th century - present
Languages	Khowar,Balti,Burushaski, others
Related scripts
Parent systems	Proto-Sinaitic Phoenician Aramaic Nabataean Arabic Perso-Arabic Urdu Khowar
Unicode
Unicode range	U+0600–U+06FF U+0750–U+077F
This article containsphonetic transcriptions in theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, seeHelp:IPA. For the distinction between[ ],/ / and ⟨ ⟩, seeIPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

TheKhowar alphabet is theright-to-leftalphabet used for theKhowar language. It is a modification of theUrdu alphabet, which is itself a derivative of thePersian alphabet andArabic alphabet and uses the calligraphicNastaʿlīq script.

The Khowar language developed during the rule of Mehtar of Chitral State. Since the early twentieth century Khowar has been written in the Khowar alphabet, which is based on the Urdu alphabet and uses the Nasta'liq script. Prior to that, the language was carried on through oral tradition. Today Urdu and English are the official languages and the only major literary usage of Khowar is in both poetry and prose composition. Khowar has also been occasionally written in a version of the Roman script called Roman Khowar since the 1960s. Despite the invention of the Khowar typewriter in 1996, Khowar newsletters and newspapers continued to be published from handwritten scripts by the Khowar authors until the late 1990s. TheMonthly Zhang is the first newsletter was the first Khowarnewspaper to useNasta’liq computer-based composition. There are efforts under way to develop more sophisticated and user-friendly Khowar support on computers and theinternet. Nowadays, nearly all Khowar newspapers, magazines, journals, and periodicals are composed on computers via various Khowar software programs.

The Nasta'liq calligraphic writing style began as aPersian mixture of scriptsNaskh andTa'liq. Nasta'liq is more cursive and flowing than itsNaskh counterpart.

A list of the letters of the Khowar alphabet and their pronunciation is given below. Khowar contains many historical spellings from Arabic and Persian, and therefore has many irregularities. The Arabic lettersyaa andhaa both have two variants in Khowar: one of theyaa variants is used at the ends of words for the sound[i], and one of thehaa variants is used to indicate theaspirated andbreathy voiced consonants. Theretroflex consonants needed to be added as well; this was accomplished by placing a superscriptط (to'e) above the correspondingdental consonants. Several letters which represent distinct consonants in Arabic are conflated in Persian, and this has carried over to Khowar. Some of the original Arabic letters are not used in Khowar.This is the list of the Khowar letters, giving the consonant pronunciation. Many of these letters also represent vowel sounds.

Footnotes:

Vowels in Khowar are represented by letters that are also consideredconsonants. Many vowel sounds can be represented by one letter. Confusion can arise, but context is usually enough to figure out the correct sound.

This is a list of Khowar vowels found in the initial, medial, and final positions.

Romanization	Pronunciation[citation needed]	Final	Medial	Initial
a	/ə/
ā	/ɑː/
i	/ɪ/
ī	/iː/
u	/ʊ/
ū	/uː/
e	/eː/
ai	/ɛ/
o	/oː/
au	/ɔ/

Short vowels ("a", "i", "u") are represented by marks above and below a consonant.

Alif (ا) is the first letter of the Khowar alphabet, and it is used exclusively as a vowel. At the beginning of a word, alif can be used to represent any of the short vowels, e.g. ابدار abdar, اسم ism, اردو Urdu. Also at the beginning, an alif (ا) followed by either wā'o (و) or ye (ی) represents a long vowel sound. However, wā'o (و) or ye (ی) alone at the beginning represents a consonant.

Alif also has a variant, callalif madd (آ). It is used to represent a long "ā" at the beginning of a word, e.g. آپک āpak, آدیمزاد ādmzaad. At the middle or end of a word, long ā is represented simply byalif (ا), e.g. باغ bāgh, آرام ārām.

Wā'o is used to render the vowels "ū", "o", and "au". It also renders the consonants "w" and 'v', but many people get confused between these two sounds.

Ye is divided into two variants:choṭī ye andbaṛī ye.

Choṭī ye (ی) is written in all forms exactly as in Persian. It is used for the long vowel "ī" and the consonant "y".

Baṛī ye (ے) is used to render the vowels "e" and "ai" (/eː/ and/æː/ respectively).Baṛī ye is distinguished in writing from choṭī ye only when it comes at the end of a word.

Retroflex consonants were not present in thePersian alphabet, and therefore had to be created specifically for Khowar. This was accomplished by placing a superscript ط (to'e) above the correspondingdental consonants.^[4]

Affricate consonants were not present in thePersian alphabet either. Two letters fromPashto alphabet were adopted for Khowar orthography to represent affricate consonants.

The letterdo chashmī he (ھ) is used in native Hindustānī words, for aspiration and breathy voice. The consonants are sometimes classified as separate letters, although they are digraphs.

• Khowar language
• Urdu alphabets
• Arabic alphabets for South Asian languages

• Articles containing Urdu-language text
• All articles with unsourced statements
• Articles with unsourced statements from October 2023
• CS1 uses Urdu-language script (ur)
• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Articles needing additional references from October 2017
• All articles needing additional references
• Pages with plain IPA
• Articles with unsourced statements from October 2017