Ḏāl
is one of the six letters the Arabic alphabet added to the twenty-two inherited from the Phoenician alphabet. It is related to the Ancient North Arabian ?, and South Arabian script|South Arabian] ?.
In Modern Standard Arabic it represents. In name and shape, it is a variant of . Its numerical value is 700. The Arabic letter ذ is named ذَالْ '. It is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:
The South Arabian alphabet retained a symbol for, Image:himjar dhal.PNG|class=skin-invert-image|14px.
When representing this sound in transliteration of Arabic into Hebrew, it is written as.
This sound is found in English, as in the words "those" or "then". In English the sound is sometimes rendered "dh" when transliterated from foreign languages, but when it occurs in English words it is one of the pronunciations occurring for the digraph "th". Azerbaijan is spelled with in Arabic script: أذربيجان.
In early forms of the New Persian language and a in practice followed by its writers, who used the letter dhal in lieu of dal, in the middle of a word when the dal is preceded and followed by a vowel, or when dal was in the final position and preceded by a vowel, the letter was referred to as a dotted dhal''' or dal-i mu'ajjam.
Pronunciations
Between and within contemporary varieties of Arabic, pronunciation of cognates with the letter differs:- The Gulf, Iraqi, Tunisian dialects use the Classical and Modern Standard sound of .
- In Maghrebi Arabic, it is consistently pronounced as the voiced dental plosive.
- In Hejazi Arabic, it merges with or depending on the word or it is pronounced as.
- In the Mashriq, it becomes a sibilant voiced alveolar fricative. Furthermore, in words fully assimilated into a Mashriq dialect, the sound has merged with .