Select languages...
How Sindhi packages meaning
Sindhi grammar at a glance
Select a language above to see its architecture overview.
Common questions about Sindhi
What are Sindhi's implosive consonants?
Sindhi has four implosive stops — ٻ (ɓ), ڏ (ᶑ), ڳ (ɠ), ڄ (ʄ) — produced by pulling air inward rather than pushing it out. These are unique among Indo-Aryan languages and likely entered Sindhi from a now-extinct substrate language of the Indus Valley. They're fully contrastive: ٻار (ɓāru, 'child') vs بار (bāru, 'weight') are different words.
How do pronominal suffixes work on Sindhi verbs?
Sindhi can attach pronoun-like suffixes directly to the verb to mark who's acting and who's receiving: ماريانس (māry-ā-ni-s, 'I hit him') packs subject, object, and tense into one word. This is similar to Kashmiri but completely absent in Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, and Gujarati. The suffixes are optional — speakers can use full pronouns instead for emphasis.
What's unusual about the Sindhi genitive postposition?
The genitive postposition جو (jo) is unique in Indo-Aryan because it declines like an adjective — it agrees in gender, number, and case with the POSSESSED noun, not the possessor. So 'the boy's book' uses جو if book is masculine, but جي (jī) if it's feminine. Most other Indo-Aryan genitives (का/کی, -નું, -ର) follow this pattern, but جو is morphologically more like a full adjective.
Is Sindhi SOV or SVO?
Sindhi is SOV by default — the verb comes at the end. The flexible case-marking system (postpositions + oblique case on nouns) allows some word order flexibility for emphasis. Pronominal suffixes on the verb also reduce the need for explicit object nouns and pronouns in the sentence.
How do Persian and Arabic influence Sindhi grammar?
Sindhi's high-register vocabulary draws heavily on Persian and Arabic due to centuries of Muslim rule and cultural contact. But unlike Urdu, Sindhi's core grammar remains firmly Indo-Aryan — the implosive consonants, pronominal suffixes, and split-ergative alignment are Prakrit inheritances. The Persian/Arabic layer is lexical and stylistic, not structural.
Sources for Sindhi
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Trumpp, Ernest (1872). "Grammar of the Sindhi Language." Trübner and Co., London. — Consulted directly: noun gender (pp.31-41), plural (pp.104-111), cases (pp.111-128), compound verbs Ch.XVII (pp.338-344, PDF pp.410-416).
- Yegorova, R. P. (1971). "The Sindhi Language." Nauka Publishing, Moscow. — Consulted directly: noun gender/case (pp.36-43), pronouns (pp.56-68), verbs (pp.74-91), Past Perfective paradigm of halaṇu (pp.88-89: 1SG.M haliuse, 2SG.M halē), compound nominal verbs (pp.107-108).
- Khubchandani, Lachman M. (2003). "Sindhi." In George Cardona & Dhanesh Jain (eds.), "The Indo-Aryan Languages." Routledge. — Consulted directly: §4.3.2 nouns, §4.3.3 pronouns Table 17.5, §4.4.2 moods, Table 17.6 (subjunctive), Table 17.7 (verb in indicative mood: 1SG.M -UsI, 2SG.M -ẽ), §4.4.3 compound verbs, §5.5 bound-pronouns Table 17.8.
- Cole, R. A. (1904). "An Elementary Sindhi Grammar." Oxford University Press.