Ṛaṛa: The Gurmukhi Letter

Ṛaṛa is the thirty-fifth and last letter of the Gurmukhi painti, and reaching it completes the count that gives the alphabet its Punjabi name. It writes a retroflex flap: the tongue tip, curled back toward the roof of the mouth, strikes it once briefly and moves on. The sound is distinct from the r of Rara, which is made further forward and held longer, and from the retroflex stop of Ḍadda, which is a full closure rather than a strike, and Punjabi keeps all three apart. Its most unusual property is where it can appear.

Ṛaṛa never begins a word. It occurs medially and finally and nowhere else, which makes it the only letter of the painti whose distribution is constrained by a rule of the language rather than by the accidents of vocabulary, and a learner is taught that rule alongside the shape. It is also encoded in its own right rather than as a marked variant of another letter, which reflects its standing in Punjabi as a full consonant rather than as an extension of the kind the six dotted letters represent. In the recitation of the alphabet it is the letter on which the painti stops. The three way distinction between Rara, Ḍadda and Ṛaṛa is one that a learner from outside the region typically hears as a single sound at first, and it is the last of the retroflex contrasts the painti asks for. Because Ṛaṛa cannot begin a word, a reader also has a positional cue that the other two do not offer: a retroflex sound at the start of a word is never this letter, which narrows the choice before the ear has to do any work at all.