Kohistani Shina is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in the former Kohistan District of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, northern Pakistan.
[9][5] Since the first attempts at accurately representing Shina's phonology in the 1960s there have been several proposed orthographies for the different varieties of the language, with debates centering on how to write several retroflex sound not present in Urdu and whether vowel length and tone should be represented.
For example, it is common to see someone use سً instead of ݜ for [ʂ], or use sukun ◌ْ (U+0652) instead of small sideway noon ◌ࣿ (U+08FF) to indicate short vowels.
Some documents preserve the original spelling, despite the letters being homophones and not having any independent sound of their own, similar to orthographic conventions of Persian and Urdu.
Whereas other documents prefer to rewrite all loanwords in a single Shina letter, and thus simplify the writing, similar to orthographic conventions of Kurdish and Uyghur.
All five vowels have a defined way of presentation in Kohistani Shina orthographic conventions, including letters and diacritics.
A unique diacritic, a small sideway noon ◌ࣿ (U+08FF) is used on top of these letters to indicate a short vowel.
[12] Long vowels are written with a combination of diacritics and letters aliv, waaw or ye.