Bantawa Rai Letters & Kirat Rai Script

Bantawa is the language of the Bantawa Rai, one of the Rai peoples of the eastern hills of Nepal, and it has more speakers than any other Rai language. It belongs to the Kiranti branch of the Sino-Tibetan family, together with Chamling, Kulung, Thulung, Sunuwar and Limbu, and like its relatives it packs a lot into the verb: a single verb form can show both who acts and who is acted on.

Bantawa is written in two scripts. Most of what you will find, from school primers and dictionaries to song lyrics and Facebook posts, uses Devanagari, the script of Nepali, with an orthography adapted for Bantawa. Alongside it the community has its own alphabet, the Kirat Rai script (Kirat Rai lipi, also called Rai Barṇamālā or Khambu Rai), which entered the Unicode Standard in version 16.0 in September 2024 as the block U+16D40–U+16D7F, containing 58 assigned characters.

Both are abugidas built on the same Indian pattern, so the grid above puts them side by side: each row is one sound, with the Devanagari character on the left and its Kirat Rai counterpart on the right. A gap means that script has no separate character for that sound.

Bantawa letters in Devanagari

In Devanagari every consonant letter carries a built-in vowel a: क is ka, ब is ba. Other vowels are added as signs (matras) around the consonant, so बा is baa, बि bi, बु bu, बे be and बो bo, while the full vowel letters अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ए ऐ ओ औ stand at the start of a syllable. The virama ् strips the vowel off so two consonants can join, as in बान्तवा, Bantawa itself; the anusvara ं and candrabindu ँ mark nasal sounds.

Bantawa writers mostly follow Nepali spelling habits, so the full Nepali set is here, including letters such as ऋ, ण and ष that turn up mainly in names and loanwords from Nepali and Sanskrit. A sentence ends with the danda । rather than a full stop, and numbers can be written with the Devanagari digits ० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९.

The Kirat Rai script: letters, vowel signs and digits

Kirat Rai's consonants run in the Indian order, from 𖵄 ka, 𖵅 kha, 𖵆 ga to 𖵢 ha, with 𖵠 sa placed before 𖵡 sha. It has one independent vowel letter, 𖵃 a: a word that begins with another vowel is written with 𖵃 carrying a vowel sign. Its eight vowel signs 𖵣 𖵤 𖵥 𖵦 𖵧 𖵨 𖵩 𖵪 write aa, i, u, ue, e, ai, o and au, with a single sign each for i and u.

The script also has signs that carry Rai names rather than Sanskrit ones: Tonpi 𖵁, Saat 𖵬 and Yupi 𖵭, next to the virama 𖵫, the nasal sign 𖵀 and the visarga 𖵂. It has its own danda 𖵮 and double danda 𖵯 and its own digits 𖵰 𖵱 𖵲 𖵳 𖵴 𖵵 𖵶 𖵷 𖵸 𖵹.

Because the block is so new, many phones and computers still lack a font for it, and Kirat Rai text then shows up as empty boxes. That is a missing font, not broken text: the characters you copy from this page are the standard Unicode ones and display correctly wherever a Kirat Rai font is installed.

How to type Bantawa in Devanagari and Kirat Rai

For Devanagari, add the Nepali keyboard: on Windows under Settings, Time & language, Language & region; on a Mac the Devanagari – QWERTY input source; on Android and iPhone in Gboard or the system keyboard settings. A popular choice is the Romanized Nepali layout, where k gives क and the keys follow English sounds.

Kirat Rai keyboards are still rare, so copying from the grid is the quickest way. In Microsoft Word you can type the code point and press Alt+X: 16D43 gives 𖵃 and 16D44 gives 𖵄. In HTML write 𖵃 for 𖵃, and so on through 𖵹 for the digit nine 𖵹.

Where the Bantawa Rai language is spoken

Bantawa's home is the hill country of Koshi Province in eastern Nepal, around districts such as Bhojpur and Dhankuta. Unicode's CLDR lists about 470,000 speakers for Nepal; the census counts fewer people who name it as their mother tongue, and many Rai families now speak mainly Nepali at home. Rai communities also live in Sikkim and Darjeeling in India, in Bhutan, and abroad, many of them in families with a history of service in the Gurkha regiments.

Almost every Bantawa speaker also speaks Nepali, the national language, which shares the Devanagari letters on this page. The Limbu people, the other great Kirat community of eastern Nepal, have their own script and collection under Limbu; see also Newari and Eastern Magar, and Nepal for the flag 🇳🇵, the rupee ₨ (written रू in Nepali) and the country's emoji.