Chandrabindu

Chandrabindu is a diacritic mark used in the Devanagari script and its derivatives to indicate nasalization of the vowel in the preceding syllable. It is written above the base letter as a sign often described as a crescent moon with a dot, and in Unicode it appears as the character U+0901 DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN CANDRABINDU. The effect is to nasalize the vowel, producing a nasalized syllable rather than a separate nasal consonant.

The mark is common in languages that use Devanagari and related scripts, including Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and Sanskrit transliteration. Examples include हाँ (hã) meaning "yes" and चांद (cãd) meaning "moon." In both cases the vowel is nasalized. Chandrabindu is used across other Indic languages that adopt Devanagari or have analogous signs in their scripts.

Chandrabindu is functionally distinct from anusvara, which indicates a nasal consonant sound following the vowel and is written as a dot above or near the letter. Anusvara represents a nasal consonant, such as m, n, or ng, depending on context, whereas chandrabindu marks nasalization of the vowel itself. In romanization, nasalization is commonly shown with a tilde over the vowel (for example ã) or with a combining tilde, depending on the transcription system.