Dhaal

The voiced th of this — same shape as daal with a single dot added above.

Sound

Dhaal is /ð/, the voiced interdental fricative — the th in English this, that, the, mother. The tongue tip rests between or just behind the teeth and the vocal folds vibrate. It is the voiced counterpart of thaa (ث): same articulation, different voicing.

English speakers can produce this sound easily — the trick is just remembering which English th it is. This is dhaal; thin is thaa.

Like thaa, dhaal shifts in many dialects. In urban Egyptian and Levantine speech, dhaal becomes /d/ in inherited vocabulary (هَذا haadhaa, "this," is heard as haada) and /z/ in classical or learned vocabulary (ذَكي dhakii, "intelligent," is heard as zakii). Bedouin, Gulf, Iraqi, and Tunisian dialects preserve /ð/ much more reliably. As with thaa, the same word can therefore be heard with three different consonants depending on the speaker.

Forms

Connecting behavior

Dhaal is a non-connector to the left, like daal, raa, zaay, alif, and waw. It joins to the letter on its right when one is there, but never extends a tail to the left. Within a word, dhaal closes the segment that ends at it, and what follows starts as a new shape.

Easy to confuse with

Dhaal looks identical to daal (د) except for the dot above — that is the entire distinction. It can also be confused at first glance with zaay (ز), since both have a single dot above and similar size, but the underlying skeleton is different: dhaal sits on the baseline like daal, while zaay swoops below the line like raa.

Examples in common words

A note on handwriting

The body of dhaal is the same quick angle as daal, drawn without lifting the pen. The dot above is small and not always carefully placed; in fast handwriting it sometimes shifts close to the body of the letter. As long as a dot is present at all, the reader knows it is dhaal — its absence is what would mean daal.