nukta

Nukta, from the Persian nuktā meaning point or dot, is a diacritic concept used in several scripts to modify consonant sounds or to distinguish letters. In the context of Indic scripts, a nukta is a small dot placed below a consonant that signals a borrowed foreign phoneme, typically arising from Persian or Arabic. The addition of the nukta allows Devanagari-based writing systems such as Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali to represent sounds not native to Sanskritic phonology, without creating entirely new base letters. Commonly formed letters include क़ (qa), ख़ (kha with nukta), ग़ (gha), ज़ (za), and फ़ (fa). These characters are used primarily in loanwords from Arabic, Persian, or other languages, and their pronunciation can vary by language and loanword.

In the Urdu and Persian scripts, nukta also refers to the system of dots that distinguish similar-looking consonants. Dots may appear above, below, or around letters to differentiate phonemes, which is essential to reading and writing in these scripts.

The nukta has historical roots in the Urdu-Persianate and Devanagari writing traditions, arising from contact between Sanskrit-based systems and Persianate literature. In modern typography and digital encoding, nukta-bearing letters are widely supported in Unicode and common fonts, enabling accurate representation of loanwords and transliterations.