Dammah

Dammah, also spelled damma, is one of the diacritical marks used in the Arabic script. It indicates the short vowel /u/ after a consonant and is classified as one of the harakat, the set of diacritics that guide pronunciation and reading.

The dammah is a small mark placed above the consonant. In many fonts it resembles a tiny curved comma. Its position above the letter distinguishes it from other diacritics such as the fatha (short /a/) and kasra (short /i/).

Functionally, the dammah marks the presence of the short vowel /u_, making the syllable sound like "u" when the letter is pronounced in isolation or within a word. It is especially important in learners’ materials and in Qur’anic or carefully vocalized texts where precise pronunciation is required. In unvoweled Arabic script, the dammah may be omitted, and readers rely on context, morphology, and practice to derive the correct pronunciation.

Dammah can also appear as part of tanween (the doubled diacritics indicating indefiniteness and case). When used with tanween, it produces dammatan, written as ٌ, which indicates an indefinite noun with a nominative or other case ending, depending on the sentence structure.

In modern standard Arabic, diacritics like the dammah are often omitted in everyday writing, newspapers, and many digital texts, though they are retained in education, religious texts, and linguistic materials to aid correct reading and pronunciation.