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Anusvara ( ; , , ), also known as Bindu ( ; ), is a symbol used in many Indic scripts to mark a type of nasalization, typically transliterated or in standards like ISO 15919 and IAST. Depending on its location in a word and the language for which it is used, its exact pronunciation can vary. In the context of ancient Sanskrit, anusvara is the name of the particular nasal sound itself, regardless of written representation.
The exact nature of the sound has been subject to debate. The material in the various ancient phonetic treatises points towards different phonetic interpretations, and these discrepancies have historically been attributed to either differences in the description of the same pronunciationWhitney, cited in or to dialectal or diachronic variation. In a 2013 reappraisal of the evidence, Cardona concludes that these reflect real dialectal differences.
The environments in which the anusvara could arise, however, were well defined. In the earliest Vedic Sanskrit, it was an allophone of /m/ at a morpheme boundary, or of /n/ within morphemes, when it was preceded by a vowel and followed by a fricative (). In later Sanskrit its use expanded to other contexts, first before /r/ under certain conditions, then, in Classical Sanskrit, before and .
Later still, Pāṇini gave anusvara as an alternative pronunciation as word-final sandhi, and later treatises also prescribed it at morpheme junctions and within morphemes. In the later written language, the diacritic used to represent anusvara was optionally used to indicate a nasal stop having the same place of articulation as a following plosive, which was written in some evolved scripts (e.g. in Bengali-Assamese) as an additional sandhi letter (no longer as a diacritic) for Vedic transcriptions of Sanskrit, to distinguish it with the anusvara diacritic that was used to transcribe other phonemes.
In writing Sanskrit, the anusvara is often used as an alternative representation of the nasal stop with the same place of articulation as the following plosive. For example, 'limb (of the body)' may be written with either a conjunct, अङ्ग aṅga, or with an anusvara, अंग aṃga. A variant of the anusvara, the anunāsika or 'chandrabindu', was used more explicitly for nasalized vowels, as in अँश aṃśa for 'portion'.William Bright, "The Devanagari Script", in Daniels & Bright, The World's Writing Systems, OUP, 1996.
The precise phonetic value of the phoneme, whether it is represented by or Chandrabindu]], is dependent on the phonological environment.The following rules are from
Word-finally, it is realized as nasalization of the preceding vowel: kuāṃ , "a well". It results in vowel nasalization also medially between a short vowel and a non-obstruent ( kuṃvar "a youth", gaṃṛāsā "a long-handled axe") and, in native words, between a long vowel and a voiceless plosive ( dāṃt "tooth", sāṃp "a snake", pūṃch "tail").
It is pronounced as a homorganic nasal, with the preceding vowel becoming nasalized allophone, in the following cases: between a long vowel and a voiced plosive ( tāṃbā "copper", cāṃdī "silver"), between a long vowel and a voiceless plosive in loanwords ( dāṃt "repressed", baiṃk "a bank", khazāṃcī "cashier"), and between a short vowel and an obstruent ( saṃbhāl- "to support", saṃdūk "a chest").
The last rule has two sets of exceptions in which the results only in the nasalization of the preceding short vowel. Words from the first set are morphologically derived from words with a long nasalized vowel ( baṃṭ- , "to be divided" from bāṃṭ- , "to divide"; siṃcāī , "irrigation" from sīṃc- , "to irrigate"). In such cases, the vowel is sometimes denasalized (, instead of , ). The second set is composed of a few words like (pahuṃc- , "to arrive" and haṃs- , "to laugh"). lists five more such words: dhaṃs- "to sink", phaṃs- "to be stuck", haṃslī "a necklace", haṃsiyā "a sickle" and haṃsī "laughter".
Although the anusvara is a consonant in Bengali phonology, it is treated in the written system as a diacritic in that it is always directly adjacent to the preceding consonant, even when consonants are spaced apart in titles or banners: বাং-লা-দে-শ baṅ-la-de-ś, not বা-ং-লা-দে-শ ba-ṅ-la-de-ś for বাংলাদেশ Bangladesh. It is never pronounced with the inherent vowel 'ô' ( or ), and it cannot take a vowel sign (instead, the consonant ঙ uṅô is used before vowels).
Burmese also uses a dot above a letter to indicate the nasalized ending (called "Myanmar Sign Anusvara" in Unicode), called သေးသေးတင် thay thay tin () (ံ)
In Devanagari and related scripts, the anunasika is represented by the chandrabindu diacritic ( example: माँ).
In Burmese language, the anunasika, called သေးသေးတင် () and represented as , creates the nasalized ending when it is attached as a dot above a letter. The anunasika represents the -m final in Pali.
| {class="wikitable" | + South Asian scripts ! Script !! Sign !! Example !! Unicode | ||
| U+0982 | |||
| U+09FC | |||
| U+11C3D | |||
| U+11001 | |||
| U+11101 | |||
| U+0902 | |||
| Devanagari Vedic | ꣳ | U+A8F3 | |
| Devanagari Vedic Double | ꣴ | U+A8F4 | |
| U+1193B | |||
| U+11837 | |||
| U+11302 | |||
| U+1135E | |||
| U+1135F | |||
| U+11300 | |||
| U+0A82 | |||
| U+11D95 | |||
| U+0A02 | |||
| U+1612D | |||
| U+11081 | |||
| U+0C82 | |||
| U+0CF3 | |||
| U+10A0E | |||
| U+11234 | |||
| U+112DF | |||
| U+16D40 | |||
| U+0D02 | |||
| U+0D00 | |||
| U+0D04 | |||
| U+11CB5 | |||
| 𑴌𑵀 | U+11D40 | ||
| U+1163D | |||
| U+1880 | |||
| U+119DE | |||
| U+0B02 | |||
| U+11444 | |||
| U+1145F | |||
| U+11181 | |||
| U+A880 | |||
| U+115BD | |||
| U+0D82 | |||
| U+11A96 | |||
| U+A80B | |||
| U+116AB | |||
| U+0B82 | |||
| U+0C02 | |||
| U+0C04 | |||
| U+0F7E | |||
| U+114C0 | |||
| U+11A38 |
| + Southeast Asian scripts ! Script !! Sign !! Example !! Unicode |
| U+1B02 |
| U+1036 |
| U+A981 |
| U+11F01 |
| U+17C6 |
| U+0ECD |
| U+1B80 |
| U+1A74 |
| U+0E4D |
|}
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