Sindhi transliteration

Sindhi is a language broadly spoken by the people of the historical Sindh region in the Indo subcontinent. Modern Sindhi is written in an extended Perso-Arabic script in Sindh province of Pakistan^[1] and (formally) in extended-Devanagari by Sindhis in partitioned India.^[2] Historically, Sindhi was written in various forms of Landa scripts and various other Indic scripts.^[3]

Sindhi Transliteration is essential to convert between Arabic and Devanagari so that speakers of both the countries can read the text of each other.^[4] In modern day, Sindhi script colloquially just refers to the Perso-Arabic script since majority of Sindhis are from Pakistan. It is also important to note that the Sindhi script is not same as the Urdu-Shahmukhi script,^[5] hence one cannot use script conversions like Hindi-Urdu Transliteration.

Technically, a direct one-to-one mapping or rule-based script conversion is not possible between Pakistani and Indian Sindhi, majorly since Devanagari is an abugida script and Arabic-Sindhi is an abjad script, and also other constraints like multiple similar characters from Perso-Arabic which map onto a single character in Devanagari.^[6] Hence it is preferred to use dictionary-based or machine learning-based transliteration between the Sindhi scripts.^[7] For colloquial usage in the digital space where writing Sindhi in Latin script is prevalent, Romanisation of Sindhi is used.^[8]

In addition to Sindhi, there have been attempts to design Indo-Pakistani transliteration systems for digraphic languages like Punjabi (written in Gurmukhi in East Punjab and Shahmukhi in West Punjab), Saraiki (written in an extended-Shahmukhi script in Saraikistan and unofficially in Sindhi-Devanagari script in India) and Kashmiri (written in extended Perso-Arabic by Kashmiri Muslims and extended-Devanagari by Kashmiri Hindus).^[9][10][11]