This is a companion post to a previous post that lists the consonants of the Punjabi alphabet. Or, in other words, now I can finally provide some closure to being able to read Punjabi. (Making sense of what I read, of course, is a totally different problem.) The first three letters of the alphabet -- ੳ, ਅ, and ੲ -- are not used by themselves. Each serves as a foundation on which independent vowels are formed. Vowels take two forms: (1) independent vowels, which stand alone or can be used as the first letter in a word, are formed by adding a vowel sign to one of the three bases; and (2) dependent vowels, which are formed by adding a vowel sign to a consonant (in the second case, the vowel can not be the first letter of the word).

Dependent Vowels

Independent Vowels