Lalla and the Extension That Marks a Dialect

Five of the six dotted letters of Gurmukhi solve the same problem: a borrowed word contains a sound the alphabet has no letter for, and rather than design a new shape the script marks an existing letter. The sixth, built on Lalla, is different in kind. The retroflex lateral it writes is not a borrowing at all. It is a sound of Punjabi itself, distinguished from the plain l in some varieties of the language and not in others, and the decision to give it a sign belongs to the standardisation of modern Punjabi rather than to the accommodation of foreign vocabulary. That makes it a dialect marker in a way none of the other five is, and it has the practical consequence that a text written by someone whose speech does not make the distinction will simply lack the letter, without any error being involved.

Standardising a script for a language with real internal variation always produces cases of this kind, where a sign is available and its use is optional in practice however the standard is worded. The atlas records the letter as an extension outside the painti and records the variation rather than presenting either usage as the correct one, since the correctness is not settled and is not the atlas to settle.