Bagheli Language Letters

Bagheli (बघेली), also called Baghelkhandi, is the language of Baghelkhand, the hill and plateau country around Rewa in north-eastern Madhya Pradesh. It takes its name from the Baghel Rajputs, the dynasty that ruled the kingdom of Rewa. Linguists place it in the Eastern Hindi group together with Awadhi and Chhattisgarhi, and it has its own ISO language code, bfy, even though the Census of India counts it as a mother tongue under Hindi.

Bagheli has no alphabet of its own. It is written in Devanagari, the script of Hindi, Marathi and Nepali, and spelling is not fixed by any single standard: writers mostly follow Hindi conventions and spell dialect words the way they are said. School, newspapers and offices use Standard Hindi, while Bagheli is the language of home, the village and the market, of folk songs, poetry, local comedy videos and messages between friends. Everything you need to write it is on this page.

How the Devanagari letters work

Devanagari is an abugida: every consonant letter carries a built-in short a, so क alone is ka and कम is kam. Other vowels after a consonant are written with a vowel sign, a matra, attached to it: का कि की कु कू के कै को कौ. The full vowel letters अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ए ऐ ओ औ are used only at the start of a word or after another vowel, as in आम (mango) or ऊपर (up). The long line on top, the headstroke, joins the letters of a word.

The virama ् removes the built-in vowel, and two consonants written together usually merge into a conjunct: क + ् + ष gives क्ष, त + ् + र gives त्र, ज + ् + ञ gives ज्ञ. These conjuncts have no code points of their own; they are typed as those three characters and the font draws the joined shape. The anusvara ं and the candrabindu ँ mark nasal sounds (हाँ "yes"); in everyday writing the anusvara also stands for ङ ञ ण न म before another consonant, so ङ and ञ are mostly seen in Sanskrit spellings.

The dot below, the nukta ़, turns ड and ढ into the flapped sounds ड़ and ढ़, which are very common in Bagheli as in Hindi (पढ़ना "to read"). ऋ ृ and the visarga ः appear in learned words taken from Sanskrit (कृपा, दुःख), and ऑ ॉ write the English o in loanwords such as डॉक्टर. Hindi's dotted letters for Persian and Arabic sounds (ज़ फ़ क़) are left out here: rural eastern Hindi speech, Bagheli included, generally says those words with j, ph and k and writes them so.

Bagheli language words, songs and sentences

Bagheli shares many everyday words with its eastern neighbours rather than with Standard Hindi. "What" is का, where Hindi says क्या, and "my, our" is हमार, where Hindi says मेरा or हमारा, both familiar to speakers of Awadhi and Bhojpuri too. A common greeting in the villages is राम राम, said with folded hands 🙏.

Much written Bagheli is song. Families sing सोहर (sohar) when a child is born, कजरी (kajari) in the rainy month of Sawan, फाग (faag) at Holi, and गारी (gari), teasing songs aimed at the groom's party, at weddings; बिरहा (birha) and recitations of the Ramayana in Bagheli are loved too. People search for these lyrics in Devanagari and post them with the songs, which is one good use for the letters above.

How to type Bagheli in Devanagari on a keyboard and phone

There is no separate Bagheli keyboard; the Hindi one has every letter Bagheli needs. On Windows, add Hindi under Settings → Time & language → Language & region and choose a layout: Hindi Traditional (InScript) puts the letters on fixed keys, and the phonetic layout lets you type ka to get क. Switch with Win+Space. On a Mac, add Hindi – Transliteration or Devanagari – QWERTY under System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources and switch with Control+Space or the Globe key.

On a phone, add the Hindi keyboard in Gboard or in iPhone settings. Both offer transliteration: type ram ram in Latin letters and pick राम राम from the suggestions, which is a common way to write Bagheli on WhatsApp. In HTML, any letter can be written by its code: ब is ब, । is the danda । and ₹ is ₹.

Devanagari has its own full stop, the danda ।, and ॥ marks the end of a verse; commas, question marks, exclamation marks and quotation marks are the same as in English. Numbers can be written with Devanagari digits ०१२३४५६७८९ or with 0–9, which are now more common in print. Prices take the rupee sign: ₹५० or ₹50.

Where Bagheli is spoken

Bagheli is at home in the districts of Rewa, Satna, Sidhi, Singrauli, Shahdol, Umaria and Anuppur in Madhya Pradesh, and over the borders in neighbouring parts of Uttar Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. CLDR estimates about 690,000 speakers: roughly 520,000 in India and 170,000 in Nepal. Estimates vary widely between sources, because the Indian census records Bagheli speakers under Hindi.

Its closest relatives are Awadhi to the north and Chhattisgarhi to the south, the other two Eastern Hindi languages, with Bundeli spoken to the west and Bhojpuri further east. All of them are written with the same Devanagari letters: see the Hindi, Awadhi, Chhattisgarhi and Bhojpuri collections, and the India and Nepal pages for the flags 🇮🇳 🇳🇵 and their national symbols.