Wiktionary:About Shina


 * See also Category:Shina language, Category:Kohistani Shina language

Script
Shina [ISO 639-3: scl], is usually written in an adapted version of the Urdu alphabet. Also, the letter has been borrowed from Pashto.

For the literary Shina of Gilgit, a set of additional letters have been established for consonants that do not exist in Urdu, and a diacritic sign – represented by the Unicode character ࣿ|08FF – is used to mark short vowels.

The Dras variety of Shina can also be written in a form of Devanagari script.

Varieties
There are considerable dialectal differences between the Shina of Gilgit one the one hand, and that of Chilas and the Astore Valley on the other hand.

Thus, if you are not sure if a particular word or grammatical form exists in all Shina varieties, please indicate the dialect(s) in which you know they are used.

Remember also that, at the moment, this section covers only the Shina dialects of Gilgit-Baltistan and Jammu and Kashmir, but not those of Kohistan (Palasi; [ISO 639-3: plk]), or the related languages of the Shina group – Ushojo, Kalkoti, Sawi, Palula, Kundal Shahi, and Brokskat – all of which have individual language codes.

Basic article
The Shina entry is organised by part of speech (Noun/Verb/Adjective/Adverb...) as the primary divider. These are normally given as a level 3 header:  etc.

This header should be followed by the headword line which minimally contains the entry name, which must be added through a headword-line template; if no suitable template exists, use directly.

Categorization
See Category:Shina language for available categories.

Topic categories
Apart from categorising by part of speech, it is also desirable to categorize entries by topic. This is often done by preceding the definition with

Grammar

 * For Shina verbs, the lemma form is the infinitive, which takes a different ending in Gilgiti than in most other varieties.
 * There are two grammatical genders in Shina. These are indicated by  (masculine) or   (feminine) in the headword-line template (see above).