[4] Outliers of Shina language such as Brokskat are found in Ladakh, Kundal Shahi in Azad Kashmir, Palula and Sawi in Chitral, Ushojo in the Swat Valley and Kalkoti in Dir.

A number of schemes have been proposed, but presently, there is no single writing system used by speakers of Shina.

Due to the effects of dominant languages in Pakistani media like Urdu, Standard Punjabi, and English, in addition to the religious significance of Arabic and Persian, Shina is continuously expanding its vocabulary base with loan words.

A small community of Shina speakers is also settled in the Neelam valley of Azad Jammu and Kashmir.

[10][11] A small community of Shina speakers is also settled in India in the far north of the Kargil district bordering Gilgit-Baltistan.

[17] Only in the late 2010s has Shina orthography been standardized and primers as well as dictionaries endorsed by the territorial government of Gilgit-Baltistan have been published.

[18][19] 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.

Debates have centered on how to write several retroflex sounds 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 Shina orthographic conventions, including letters and diacritics.