Nunation
Nunation, in some Semitic languages such as Arabic, is the addition of one of three vowel diacritics to a noun or adjective.
This is used to indicate the word ends in an alveolar nasal without the addition of the letter nūn. The noun phrase is fully declinable and syntactically unmarked for definiteness, identifiable in speech.
Literary Arabic
When writing Literary Arabic in full diacritics, there are three nunation diacritics, which indicate the suffixes ' , ' /-in/, and ' /an/. The orthographical rules for nunation with the sign is by an additional ', above or above .In most dialects of spoken Arabic, nunation only exists in words and phrases borrowed from the literary language, especially those that are declined in the accusative. It is still used in some Bedouin dialects in its genitive form, such as in Najdi Arabic.
Since Arabic has no indefinite article, nouns that are nunated are indefinite, and so the absence of the definite article triggers nunation in all nouns and substantives except diptotes. A given name, if it is not a diptote, is also nunated when declined, as in أَشْهَدُ أَنَّ مُحَمَّدًا رَسُولُ الله, in which the word محمد , a given name derived from the passive participle of wikt:حمد, is nunated to مُحَمَّدًا to signal that it is in the accusative case, as it is the grammatical subject of a sentence introduced by أنَّ.
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In Levantine Arabic, it is standard to write on the, rather than on the previous letter: