fathah

Fathah, spelled with the Arabic transliteration fatḥah and also written as fatha, is a diacritical mark used in the Arabic script to indicate a short vowel pronounced as a simple /a/ sound. It appears as a small diagonal line placed above a consonant and is one of the harakat, the system of diacritics that guide pronunciation in Arabic orthography.

In practice, the fatḥah shows how a word should be vocalized when short vowels are written or when ambiguity could arise. Arabic texts often omit short vowels in everyday writing, but fatḥah is commonly provided in educational materials, dictionaries, religious texts, and children's books to aid correct reading and recitation. The mark can occur alone to indicate a single short /a/ vowel, or in combination with other diacritics (for example as part of tanwin, fatḥatān, which signals the nasalized ending -an).

Origins and usage context: The fatḥah is part of the traditional Arabic diacritic system, which evolved to preserve accurate pronunciation and recitation of the language, especially the Qur’an. The name derives from the Arabic root فتح (fataḥ), related to “opening,” reflecting the notion of opening the mouth to pronounce the vowel.

Encoding and scripts: In digital text, the fatḥah is encoded in Unicode as U+064E. The mark is used across languages that employ the Arabic script, including Persian, Urdu, and other languages, in similar phonetic contexts to indicate the short /a/ vowel.