Harakat: the Arabic vowel marks, explained by ear
The small marks that tell you how to say a word, why they usually aren't there, and how to type them.
Arabic writes its long vowels as letters and mostly leaves the short ones out. ูุชุจ is three consonants, k-t-b, and on its own it could be kataba (he wrote), kutub (books) or kutiba (it was written). A native reader knows which from the sentence. A learner doesn't.
The marks that fill the gap are called harakat, or tashkeel for the whole system. There are only a handful, and you can learn to read them in an afternoon. Learning to hear them is the part that takes practice, so this post finishes with a game for exactly that.
The marks
| Mark | Name | Sound | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| ุจู | fatha | short a, a small line above | ุณูู ูู samak, fish |
| ุจู | kasra | short i, a small line below | ู ูููุญ mil7, salt |
| ุจู | damma | short u, a small curl above | ุฎูุจูุฒ khubz, bread |
| ุจู | sukun | no vowel after the letter, a small circle above | ููุฏูุฑ qidr, a pot |
| ุจู | shadda | the letter is doubled, a small w above | ุณูููููู sikkin, a knife |
| ุจู ุจู ุจู | tanween | a doubled vowel: -an, -in, -un at the end of a word | ุดูููุฑูุง shukran, thanks |
Shadda sits on top of the vowel marks rather than replacing them, so a doubled letter with a short a carries both: ุซููููุงุฌูุฉ thallaja, a fridge, has a shadda and a fatha on its ู.
Why you almost never see them
Open an Arabic newspaper, a menu or a text message and there will be no harakat at all, apart from the odd shadda or a mark added where a word would otherwise be ambiguous. Adults who grew up reading Arabic don't need them, in the same way you don't need stress marks to know how to say "record" in "record a song".
You will see them in full in four places:
- the Quran, where every vowel is marked so nothing can be misread;
- children's books and school textbooks;
- dictionaries, and poetry where the metre matters;
- material written for learners.
So harakat are scaffolding. They're how you learn a word's pronunciation in the first place. After that the word is in your head and the bare letters are enough, which is why a learner's goal isn't to read harakat forever but to need them less every month.
One thing to know if you learn a dialect: the spoken dialects drop most of Fusha's final vowels and shift some of the inner ones, so dialect words are often written with fewer marks, or with the vowels the dialect actually uses. The marks always follow the pronunciation, not the other way round.
Hearing them
Reading the marks is a lookup. Hearing them is a skill, because short vowels are short: in normal speech the difference between a and i in an unstressed syllable is easy to miss. The way to get better at it is to listen to a word and check what you heard against the spelling, many times, with words you'll actually use.
That's what the game below does. You hear a recorded word in Modern Standard Arabic, and pick which of three spellings matches. The letters are identical in all three. Only the harakat change.
How to type them
On a standard Arabic keyboard the harakat are on the shift layer. With the Windows "Arabic (101)" layout:
| Mark | Keys |
|---|---|
| fatha ู | Shift + Q |
| damma ู | Shift + E |
| kasra ู | Shift + A |
| sukun ู | Shift + X |
| shadda ู | Shift + the ุฐ key (left of 1) |
| tanween ู ู ู | Shift + W, Shift + R, Shift + S |
Type the letter first, then its mark. For a doubled letter with a vowel, type the shadda and then the vowel. Other layouts, including the ones on Mac and on phones, put the marks in different places; your system's keyboard viewer will show you where.
If you don't have an Arabic layout, or don't want to learn one, the phonetic keyboard on this site types Arabic from English letters by sound. For harakat, add = after the vowel: a= for fatha, i= for kasra, u= for damma, h= for sukun and s= for shadda. How it works, and why those keys.