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Nunation (, ), in some Semitic languages such as Classical Arabic, is the addition of one of three vowel diacritics ( ḥarakāt) 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 declension and syntactically unmarked for definiteness, identifiable in speech.
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 (that is, with ). It is still used in some Bedouin Arabic in its genitive form , such as in Najdi Arabic.
Since Arabic has no indefinite article, nouns that are nunated (except for proper nouns) are indefinite, and so the absence of the definite article triggers nunation in all nouns and substantives except diptotes (that is, derivations with only two cases in the indefinite state, -u in the nominative and -a in the accusative and genitive). A given name, if it is not a diptote, is also nunated when declined, as in أَشْهَدُ أَنَّ مُحَمَّدًا رَسُولُ الله ( "I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of Allah."), in which the word محمد , a given name derived from the passive participle of حَمَّدَ]] ("to praise"), 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 ("that").
In Levantine Arabic, it is standard to write on the , rather than on the previous letter:
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