Nuktabearing

Nukta-bearing is a term used in the study of Brahmic scripts to describe consonant letters that carry a nukta, a diacritic dot placed below the character. The nukta is used to modify the sound value of a base consonant, typically to represent phonemes that are not part of the original Sanskritic inventory but appear in Persian, Arabic, Urdu, or other loanwords and transliterations.

The concept is most associated with Devanagari and its closely related scripts, which are used for languages such as Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali. In these systems, certain consonants can appear with a nukta to signal a non-native or borrowed sound. Common examples include क़ (qa), ख़ (kha with nukta, used for a voicelike /x/ or /qa/ sound in transliteration), ग़ (ġha), ज़ (za), and फ़ (fa). These forms are produced by adding the nukta dot below the base consonant; in digital typography they may be encoded as precomposed characters or rendered with combining diacritics.

Nukta-bearing letters were developed to accommodate foreign phonemes within a single script, allowing for approximate representation of Arabic- and Persian-origin sounds in languages that traditionally used Devanagari or related scripts. In modern standard usage, many speakers may spell loanwords with alternative strategies (such as digraphs or transliterations) rather than relying on nukta-bearing forms, but the category remains part of the historical and typographic record of these scripts.