Shadda (Arabic: شَدَّة šaddah "[sign of] emphasis", also called by the verbal noun to the same root, Tashdid تشديد tašdīd "emphasis"), is one of the diacritics used with the Arabic alphabet, marking a long consonant (geminate). It is functionally equivalent to writing a consonant twice in the orthographies of languages like Latin, Italian, Swedish, and Ancient Greek, and is thus rendered in Latin script in most schemes of Arabic transliteration, e.g. رُمَّان = rummān "pomegranate".
| General Unicode |
Name | Transliteration |
|---|---|---|
| 0651 ّ ّ |
šaddah | (consonant doubled) |
When a shadda is used on a consonant which also takes a fatḥah /a/, it is written above the shadda, while if it had a kasrah (a dash below the consonant indicating that it takes a short /i/ as its vowel), the kasra is written between the consonant and the šaddah, under the shadda, rather than in its normal place.
Consonant length in Arabic is contrastive: دَرَسَ darasa means "he studied" while دَرَّسَ darrasa means "he taught"; بَكَى صَبِي bakā ṣabī means "a youth cried" while بَكَى الصَّبِي bakā ṣ-ṣabī means "the youth was cried". A consonant may be long because of the form of the noun or verb, e.g. the causative form of the verb requires the 2nd consonant of the root to be long, as in darrasa above, or by assimilation of consonants, for example the l- of the Arabic definite article assimilates to all dental consonants, e.g. (الصّبي) (a)ṣ-ṣabī instead of (a)lṣabī, or through haplology; that is, the elision of two identical consonants, for example أَقَلّ ʾaqall "less, fewer" (instead of أَقْلَل ʾaqlal), as compared to أَكْبَر ʾakbar "greater".
The syllable closing with the long consonant is made a long syllable. This affects both stress and prosody. Stress falls on the first long syllable from the end of the word, hence أَقَلّ ʾaqáll (or, with ʾiʿrāb: ʾaqállu) as opposed to أَكْبَر ʾákbaru, مَحَبَّة maḥábbah "love, agape" as opposed to مَعْرِفَة maʿrifah "[experiential] knowledge". In Arabic verse, when scanning the meter, the syllable closing with the long consonant is counted as long, just like any other syllable closing with a consonant or a syllable ending in a long vowel: أَلا تَمْدَحَنَّ ʾalā tamdaḥanna "Will you not indeed praise...?" is scanned as ʾa-lā tam-da-ḥan-na: short, long, long, short, long, short.