Balinese Alphabet & Script

Balinese (basa Bali) is written in two writing systems. Aksara Bali is the native script, descended from the Kawi script of old Java and ultimately from the Brahmi script of ancient India, so it is a cousin of Javanese ꦲꦤꦕꦫꦏ, Thai and Devanagari. For centuries it was written on lontar palm-leaf manuscripts; today it is taught in every Balinese school and appears on temple inscriptions, wedding invitations and the name boards of offices, shops and hotels.

Newspapers, schoolbooks, phones and everyday messages use the Latin alphabet, the same A–Z as Indonesian with one addition: é. Balinese has two e sounds, and the spelling keeps them apart. É é is the clear e of désa (village) and Kénkén kabaré? (how are you?); plain e is the short neutral vowel, like the a in English 'about', as in Beli, the word for an older brother that is usually shortened to Bli. In chat most people leave the accent off and write kenken kabare; dictionaries, school texts and careful writing keep it.

How Aksara Bali works: letters, vowel signs and adeg-adeg

The script is an abugida: every consonant letter carries the vowel a, so ᬓ reads ka and ᬩ ba. Everyday Balinese needs the 18 letters called wreastra, learned in the traditional order ha na ca ra ka, da ta sa wa la, ma ga ba nga, pa ja ya nya: ᬳ ᬦ ᬘ ᬭ ᬓ ᬤ ᬢ ᬲ ᬯ ᬮ ᬫ ᬕ ᬩ ᬗ ᬧ ᬚ ᬬ ᬜ. A word that begins with a vowel is normally written with ᬳ ha as its carrier.

To change the vowel you add a sign, a pangangge: ulu ᬶ above for i, suku ᬸ below for u, taling ᬾ in front for é, taling and tedung ᭀ on both sides for o, and pepet ᭂ above for the neutral e. So Bali is ᬩᬮᬶ: ba, then la with ulu. Final sounds have their own marks: cecek ᬂ adds -ng, surang ᬃ -r and bisah ᬄ -h. The adeg-adeg ᭄ cancels the vowel; at the end of a word it stays visible, but between two consonants the second one is written as a small 'hanging' form (gantungan) under the first. In Unicode you type adeg-adeg followed by the consonant and the font draws the hanging form, which is how ᬲ᭄ᬯ (swa) is built.

Extra letters, vowel letters, digits and carik punctuation

Words from Kawi (Old Javanese) and Sanskrit, the languages of Balinese religious texts, use a fuller set called swalalita: aspirated letters such as ᬔ and ᬪ, retroflex ones such as ᬝ and ᬡ, and the extra sibilants ᬰ and ᬱ. The independent vowel letters (aksara suara) ᬅ ᬇ ᬉ ᬏ ᬑ and their long tedung forms also belong mostly to this learned vocabulary and to names.

Balinese digits run ᭐ ᭑ ᭒ ᭓ ᭔ ᭕ ᭖ ᭗ ᭘ ᭙. Because some of them look like letters, a number in running text is usually set off between carik marks, as in ᭞᭒᭐᭒᭖᭞ for 2026. The carik siki ᭞ works like a comma and carik pareren ᭟ like a full stop; carik pamungkah ᭝ is a colon, and pameneng ᭠ is a line-filling mark. Pamada ᭛ and panti ᭚ begin sections; windu ᭜ is part of section-ending punctuation. Traditional texts run the words together without spaces.

How to type Balinese letters: é and the Aksara Bali keyboard

For the Latin é: on Windows hold Alt and type 0233 on the number pad (É is Alt+0201), or with the US-International layout type ' then e. On a Mac press Option+E, then e (add Shift for É). On Android and iPhone keyboards, hold down e and slide to é. In HTML write é and É.

Aksara Bali has been in Unicode since version 5.0 (2006), in the block U+1B00–U+1B7F, so the letters on this page paste as real text into documents, chats and social media. Your device needs a font for them, such as Noto Sans Balinese; without one you see empty boxes. To type it, people install a Balinese keyboard app, use an online transliterator, or copy from a page like this one. Letters are stored in reading order, not drawing order: taling ᬾ is typed after the consonant even though it is drawn in front of it.

Where Balinese is spoken, its speech levels and its relatives

Balinese is spoken by an estimated 3.3 million people, almost all in Indonesia 🇮🇩: on Bali, on the neighbouring islands of Nusa Penida, and in western Lombok, plus villages founded by Balinese settlers on Sulawesi, Sumatra and elsewhere. Nearly every speaker also uses Indonesian, the national language. Since 2018 a Bali provincial regulation has required Balinese script on the signs of public buildings and businesses, written above the Latin, and every February the province holds Bulan Bahasa Bali, a month of the Balinese language.

Balinese has speech levels: refined basa alus for elders, strangers, priests and formal occasions, and plainer speech among family and friends, so 'I' can be polite tiang or familiar icang. Its closest relatives are Sasak on Lombok and Sumbawa; it also took many words from Javanese and Kawi. See the Javanese, Sasak, Sundanese, Madurese, Indonesian and Malay collections for their letters.