Gaf or Gāf may be the name of four different Perso-Arabic letters, all representing ɡ. They are all forms of the letter kāf

Kaph

Kaph is the eleventh letter of many Semitic abjads, including Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew Kaf , Arabic alphabet , Persian alphabet...

, with additional diacritic

Diacritic

A diacritic is a glyph added to a letter, or basic glyph. The term derives from the Greek διακριτικός . Diacritic is both an adjective and a noun, whereas diacritical is only an adjective. Some diacritical marks, such as the acute and grave are often called accents...

s, such as dots and lines. There are three forms, each used in different places:

• in Persian & Urdu
• in Malay
• in Moroccan
• in Pashto

Gaf with line

is based on kāf with an additional line. It is rarely used in Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

 itself, but may be used to represent the sound ɡ when writing other languages.
It is frequently used in Persian

Persian language

Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...

 and Kurdish

Kurdish language

Kurdish is a dialect continuum spoken by the Kurds in western Asia. It is part of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian group of Indo-European languages....

 and it is one of four letters which are not found in Arabic.

Gaf with single dot

is derived from a variant form () of kāf with the addition of a dot

Dot (diacritic)

When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot is usually reserved for the Interpunct , or to the glyphs 'combining dot above' and 'combining dot below'...

. It is not used in Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

 itself, but is used in the Jawi script of Malay

Malay language

Malay is a major language of the Austronesian family. It is the official language of Malaysia , Indonesia , Brunei and Singapore...

 to represent a voiced velar stop ɡ. Unicode

Unicode

Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

 includes two forms on this letter: one based on the standard Arabic kāf, , and one based on the variant form . The latter is the preferred form.

Appearance	Code point	Name
	U+06AC	ARABIC LETTER KAF WITH DOT ABOVE
	U+0762	ARABIC LETTER KEHEH WITH DOT ABOVE	(preferred)

Gaf with three dots

is based on a variant form () of kāf with the addition of three dots

Dot (diacritic)

When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot is usually reserved for the Interpunct , or to the glyphs 'combining dot above' and 'combining dot below'...

. It is used in informal Moroccan Arabic

Moroccan Arabic

Moroccan Arabic is the variety of Arabic spoken in the Arabic-speaking areas of Morocco. For official communications, the government and other public bodies use Modern Standard Arabic, as is the case in most Arabic-speaking countries. A mixture of French and Moroccan Arabic is used in business...

 to represent ɡ. The letter is also used officially to transliterate the voiced velar plosive

Voiced velar plosive

The voiced velar plosive is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is g. Strictly, the IPA symbol is the so-called "opentail G" , though the "looptail G" is...

 as in many city names such as Agadir

Agadir

Agadir is a major city in southwest Morocco, capital of the Agadir province and the Sous-Massa-Draa economic region .-Etymology:...

  and family names such as El Guerrouj

Hicham El Guerrouj

Hicham El Guerrouj "King of the Mile" is a Moroccan former middle distance runner...

 .
Its initial and medial forms are identical to , which represents ŋ in some languages. However, their final and isolated forms are different.
See also Ng (Arabic).

External links

• Notes on some Unicode Arabic characters: recommendations for usage (PDF)