This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Gurmukhi Letters gathers the thirty five signs of the painti, Punjabi for thirty five, the script that carries the Guru Granth Sahib and stands apart from its Brahmic relatives in exactly where it places its letters.
Three vowel bearers, Ura, Aira and Iri, open the alphabet and carry no sound of their own beyond what a vowel sign gives them, Ura taking the rounded back vowels, Aira the open ones, Iri the front ones. Sassa and Haha follow, set ahead of the five ordered consonant classes rather than inside them, an arrangement Gurmukhi shares with the Landa hands its order descends from. The five classes that follow, velar, palatal, retroflex, dental and labial, each run the standard Brahmic pattern of unaspirated, aspirated, voiced, voiced aspirate and nasal.
Punjabi has become tonal, and the script preserves the trace of that change in writing: the voiced aspirates of each class have mostly lost their aspiration and voicing in speech, leaving a falling or rising tone on the neighbouring vowel instead, so letters such as Ghagga are spelled for a sound the modern language no longer makes. Haha itself carries tone and takes a rare subjoined form beneath a preceding consonant. A further set of letters outside the painti, marked with a subscript dot, was added later for the sounds of Persian and Arabic loanwords.