In some Semitic languages, notably Arabic, nunation (Arabic: تنوين tanwīn) is the addition of a final nun to a noun or adjective to indicate that it is fully declinable and syntactically unmarked for definiteness.
| Symbol | ـٌ |
ـٍ |
ـً |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transliteration | -un |
-in |
-an |
There are three of these vowel diacritics, and the signs indicate, from left to right, the endings -un (nominative case), -in (genitive), and -an (accusative). The sign ـً is most commonly written in combination with ا ʾalif (ـًا), ةً (tāʾ marbūṭah تاء مربوطة) or stand-alone ءً (hamzah همزة). An ʾalif should always be written unless the word ends in tāʾ marbūṭah, hamzah or is a diptote, even though the -un, -an or -in is not written. Nunation is used only in literary Arabic; it is absent in everyday spoken Arabic, and many Arabic textbooks introduce even literary Arabic without these endings.
Since Arabic has no indefinite article, nouns in a syntactic context unmarked for definiteness are generally indefinite; this has led to the extremely common but inaccurate belief that nunation is a marker for indefiniteness and is analogous to an indefinite article. The lack of a marker for definiteness does not necessarily make a word indefinite; in fact, many definite nouns (proper names) take nunation, as for example in the expression أشهد أن محمداً رسول الله (ʾašhadu ʾanna Muḥammadan rasūlu llāh: "I witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God."), in which the name Muhammad, a definite noun, is nunated.
Nunation may also refer to the -n ending of duals in Akkadian (until it was dropped in the Old Babylonian period).[1]