In my opinion, one of the coolest things about Indian languages is the diverse and beautiful writing systems that they have. One of the main things I hear about Indian writing systems is that they look confusing. For example, look at this word: ജനിച്ചിട്ടുള്ളവരാണ്‌. Besides the fact that it is long, all of its characters have so many twists and turns that it’s hard to keep track, making people feel confused. In many cases, a writing system defines the identity of the language. In fact, my grandmother was once confused upon seeing a English-Spanish-Polish street sign because she thought it was weird for three different languages to be written with the same alphabet. It’s for this reason that the writing systems all look different; different languages are pressured to diversify their writing in order to stand out. However, despite the fact that the scripts look different, they all (with the exception of Arabic-based writing systems like Urdu) fundamentally operate on the same system. I’ll be explaining this system and how it applies to a few languages to show you a glimpse of how to break them down in case you’ve ever wanted to read other people’s tattoos or something.

 

To explain the overarching system, our example word will be adbhuta, which is the Sanskrit word for miracle. The first step is to separate the word after every vowel. So we would divide it and say a|dbhu|ta. Then, if the part consists of a vowel only, then we find the letter for that vowel. So, for ‘a,’ the Devanagari (the script used for Hindi) letter is अ, so we put that there, making our word अdbhu|ta. Otherwise, we find the consonant letter and put a vowel modification. For example, the last sequence ‘t’ in Devanagari is त. ‘A’ as a vowel modification is marked by doing nothing, so ‘ta’ is त, making our word अdbhuत. For the middle sequence, we do the same thing. The letter for dbh is द्भ and ‘u’ is made by putting a hook below, so we get द्भु. The only thing is that complex consonants like dbh is made by combining the simple consonants द ’d’ and भ ‘bh’ in a process that is different for every language. The full word in Devanagari is अद्भुत, split like अ-द्भु-त, and here’s what it looks like in other scripts – Bengali: অ-দ্ভু-ত​, Gujarati: અ-દ્ભુ-ત, Malayalam: അ-ദ്ഭു-ത, Telugu: అ-ద్భు-త, Tamil: அ-த்பு-த. Knowing the system, we can tackle learning individual scripts by learning four main characteristics about them: the independent vowel and simple consonant letters, vowel modification, the formation of double and triple consonants, and going from spelling to pronunciation. 

 

The first characteristic is the independent vowel and simple consonant signs. There’s not a whole lot to say about this because it’s just like memorizing the alphabet, but I wanted to point a few things out about how the letters are arranged. The first thing is that this shows the alphabetical order of the language.  So if you’re looking for a word in a dictionary or are alphabetizing something, you need to know this order. In addition, the consonants from ‘ka’ to ‘ma’ are organized in a 5×5 chart, where the rows show the place in the mouth where the sound is pronounced, and the columns show the method with which it’s pronounced, which can be helpful for new learners.

 

 

The next characteristic is vowel marking. For the most part in Indian languages, this is pretty straightforward. For example, in Devanagari, the way to mark the vowel ‘i’ on a consonant is to make a line going over the top and down on the left side, like so: प > पि. However, in some languages, namely Telugu and Kannada, the combinations get more complicated. For example, adding ‘i’ to the following letters క, చ, గ, and య, we get కి, చి, గి, and యి, which are all created in a different way. While for Telugu, you might have to learn each combination separately, for other languages like Bengali there are only a few irregulars like g > gu is গ > গু. Another thing is that adding ‘a’ does nothing to the letter, i.e it is the default. To have no vowel on a letter actually requires its own special modification, like in the name Dee-ra-j, where the j has to take the vowel killer marker. 

 

The third characteristic is creating consonant clusters. There are three main methods. The first one, used by Tamil, is not combining consonants, but just putting the vowel killer on the first one and putting the vowel on the next consonant, i.e dbhu > dwithkiller+bhu > த்+பு. The second method, used by Telugu, Javanese, and Khmer, is made by putting the vowel on the first consonant, and having any following consonants change slightly and go under the first. So dbhu would be ‘d’ ద + ‘u’ + ‘bh’ భ underneath > ద్భు. The third method, used by Devanagari and most other scripts is to just mash both consonants together and put the vowel on that, so dbhu = d द + bh भ + u = द्भु. Usually, it’s easy to tell which two consonants are mashed together by knowing only a few basic rules, but sometimes there are irregulars; here are the irregulars in Devanagari : क्त kt, क्ष ksh, ज्ञ jn, त्त tt, त्र tr, द्द dd, द्म dm, and द्य dy. 

 

The final characteristic is going from spelling to pronunciation. Sometimes, things aren’t pronounced exactly as their spelled, and each language has its own quirks, so it’s important to deeply study whatever language you’re trying to learn, but here I’ll go over a major quirk: In most North Indian languages, the sound ‘a’ is deleted if at the end of the word or surrounded by consonants which are in turn surrounded by vowels. 

 

There’s alot I didn’t cover in this post, because it’s impossible to talk about every quirk of every language in great detail, but I hope that I made the process of learning these writing systems more accessible to people who may have wanted to learn but found them too hard at first and to those looking to learn for the first time.