Vowelization

Vowelization is the process of marking vowels in writing systems that primarily record consonants. It may serve to indicate pronunciation, distinguish homographs, or aid literacy. In many scripts called abjads, vowels are not usually written; vowelization adds diacritic marks or uses additional letters to represent vowel sounds. Arabic and Hebrew provide well-known examples.

In Arabic, short vowels are indicated by diacritics called harakat: fatha (a), damma (u), kasra (i), along with tanwin, sukun, and shadda. Most everyday Arabic texts omit harakat, relying on readers to supply vowels; Qur'anic and educational texts are fully vowelized.

Hebrew uses niqqud, a system of vowels as diacritics placed under or above consonant letters. Modern Hebrew often omits niqqud except in language learning materials, poetry, or dictionaries.

Other scripts, such as the Indic abugidas (Devanagari, Bengali, Tamil), inherently encode vowels with base consonant letters and accompanying diacritics (matras) that modify the vowel sound; the inherent vowel is typically /a/ and other vowels are indicated by marks or by full vowel letters in certain contexts.

Latin scripts may mark vowel quality or stress with diacritics, but this is not vowelization of an abjad; it is part of orthography and phonology in languages like French, Spanish, or Vietnamese.

In computational linguistics, vowelization often means restoring or predicting vowel signs in text that has them omitted, a common task for Arabic NLP, Hebrew processing, and historical or transliterated texts.

Vowelization thus intersects orthography, phonology, literacy pedagogy, and language technology, reflecting how different writing systems balance minimalism with phonetic transparency.