Devnagari Script (देवनागरी िलिप)

Abhishek NandanM.Des, DoD, IIT Guwahati

Origin and History

The Nagari or Devanagari alphabet descended from the Brahmi script sometime around the 11th century AD.

The name Devanagari is made up of two Sanskrit words: Deva, which means God, brahman or celestial, and nagari, which means city. The name is variously translated as “script of the city”, “heavenly/sacred script of the city” or “script of the city of the Gods or priests”.

Spread and Derived Languages

The Devnagari is spread in India, Nepal, Tibet and South-east Asia.

Places which use Devnagari are in Light green color.

It is used to write Hindi, Bhojpuri, Konkani, Maithili, Marathi, Mundari, Nepali, Pali, Sanskrit, Sindhi and many more.

Structure and Features

Type of writing system of Devnagari is Abugida / Alphasyllabary. It means that the script contains symbols for both consonants and vowels, and the consonants have inherent vowels as well.

Direction of writing is left to write in a horizontal line with a top bar running along, known as ‘Shiro rekha’.

Shiro rekha देवनागरी िलिप

Consonant letters carry an inherent vowel which can be altered or muted by means of diacritics or matra.

क ka का kaa की kee

Vowels can be written as independent letters, or by using a variety of diacritical marks which are written above, be-low, before or after the consonant they belong to. This feature is common to most of the alphabets of South and South East Asia.

Vowelswithdiacriticsअ आ ओ औ

When consonants occur together in clusters, special conjunct letters are used.

conjunt क्या

Structure and Features

Structure and Features

Vowels in Devnagari -

Other symbols -

Structure and Features

Occlusives -

Sonorants and fricatives -

Other letters -

Structure and Features

Variant letters -

Numerals -

Unicode for Devnagari

The following chart gives the latest unicode for Devnagari, i.e. The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0

Resources and References

http://www.ancientscripts.com/

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/devanagari

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devanagari

http://www.unicode.org/