Yayya: The Gurmukhi Letter

Yayya is the thirty-first letter of the Gurmukhi painti and the first of the five that follow the ordered consonant series. It writes the semivowel y, a sound made by raising the tongue toward the palate without ever closing against it, and that absence of closure is why it and its four companions sit outside the grid. The five series are organised by where in the mouth a closure is made and how it is released; a sound with no closure has no cell.

In Punjabi, Yayya is much the least used of these final five. It appears chiefly in vocabulary carried into the language from Sanskrit and from the wider north Indian devotional register rather than in the native everyday word stock, where the same historical sound has frequently developed into something else. That gives the letter a certain diagnostic value, since a Punjabi word written with Yayya is more likely than not to have come in from outside, and it also means the letter is noticeably more common in the language of the Guru Granth Sahib, which draws heavily on that devotional vocabulary, than in modern spoken Punjabi. It is one of the clearest cases in the alphabet where frequency alone tells a reader something about a word. Yayya is also a reminder that an alphabet inherits more than shapes. The decision to place the semivowels after the grid, and to place y first among them, belongs to the Brahmic tradition rather than to anything about Punjabi, and Gurmukhi took it along with the rest of the ordering.