Bodo Alphabet & Letters

Bodo, the language of the Bodo people of Assam, is written today in Devanagari, the script of Hindi, Marathi and Nepali. That is a recent choice. Bodo is not related to Hindi: it is a Tibeto-Burman language of the Boro-Garo group, a cousin of Garo, Dimasa, Kokborok, Rabha and Tiwa, and for most of its written history it was spelled in other scripts. Christian missionaries printed Bodo in the Roman alphabet, and Bodo schoolbooks and writers of the early twentieth century used the Assamese script.

The Bodo Sahitya Sabha, the Bodo literary society founded in 1952, decided in 1974 that Bodo should be written in the Roman script. The Assam government opposed it, and the dispute grew into the Bodo Roman script movement of 1974–75, in which protesters were killed. In 1975 the Sabha accepted Devanagari, the compromise offered by the central government, and it was then brought into Bodo-medium schools, though adoption was slow and some writers kept to Roman or Assamese letters. Some Bodo writers, especially in churches, still use Roman letters, and Roman spellings such as Bwisagu are everywhere online.

Bodo letters: vowels, matras and consonants

Devanagari is an abugida: each consonant carries a vowel by itself, and other vowels are added as signs called matras: बा, बि, बी, बु, बू, बे, बै, बो, बौ. The CIIL Bodo primer lists the full vowel letters अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ऋ ए ऐ ओ औ, used where a syllable begins with a vowel. Bodo's set, as listed by Unicode's CLDR, also has ऍ ऑ and their signs ॅ ॉ for the vowels of English words, and the sign ृ for words from Sanskrit.

The consonants are the familiar Devanagari rows: क ख ग घ ङ, च छ ज झ ञ, ट ठ ड ढ ण, त थ द ध न, प फ ब भ म, then य र ल व and श ष स ह, with ळ and the nukta dot ़ that makes ड़. Several of them, such as the aspirated घ झ ढ ध भ and the retroflex ण ष, turn up mostly in borrowed words, because Bodo's own words do not use these sounds. Bodo has no ङ in the CLDR set: the CIIL Bodo primer includes ङ in its consonant chart, despite its omission from CLDR. The virama ् joins consonants into conjuncts, and sentences end with the danda ।.

Bodo also has sounds Devanagari was not made for. It has a vowel of its own, usually described as an unrounded u-like sound (IPA ɯ), which Roman Bodo spells with a w, as in Bwisagu; it is also tonal, and Bodo orthography uses U+02BC ʼ as a tone mark. That is why Bodo spelling needs one mark of its own, below.

The Bodo ʼ tone mark in बरʼ and अक्टʼबर

The Bodo name of the language, as Unicode's CLDR writes it, is बर’, read Boro. The Bodo orthographic mark is U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE ʼ; it marks tone rather than changing the preceding consonant to an o sound.

In Bodo orthography the mark is U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE ʼ, used as a tone mark. It differs from the straight apostrophe ' (U+0027) and the right single quotation mark ’ (U+2019), so use ʼ in Bodo words. In HTML write ʼ or copy it from this page.

You will also see the older spelling बड़ो (Bodo), with ड़, in Hindi texts and in some software; बर’ is the form in CLDR's Bodo data.

How to type Bodo on a keyboard and phone

Every letter Bodo uses is on the standard Devanagari layouts, so a Hindi keyboard types Bodo. Windows: Settings → Time & language → Language & region → add Hindi, then choose Hindi Traditional (the InScript layout, one key per letter, with ॅ and ॉ included) or Hindi Phonetic, which turns Latin typing into Devanagari. Switch with Windows + Space. The English (India) layout gives ₹ with Right Alt + 4.

Mac: System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources → add Hindi and pick Devanagari or Hindi – Transliteration. Phones: add a Devanagari keyboard in Gboard, SwiftKey or on iPhone; copy the Bodo tone mark ʼ (U+02BC) from this page.

There is no separate Bodo font: any Devanagari font (the ones built into Windows, macOS, Android and iOS, or free families such as Noto Sans Devanagari) writes Bodo. Numbers are usually the ordinary digits 0–9, which CLDR sets as Bodo's default. In HTML, the danda । is । and ₹ is ₹; do not use the vertical bar | for a danda.

Where the Bodo language is spoken

Bodo is spoken mainly in Assam, India, above all in the Bodoland Territorial Region on the north bank of the Brahmaputra (Kokrajhar, Chirang, Baksa, Udalguri and Tamulpur districts), and by Bodo communities elsewhere in Assam and in neighbouring states. CLDR estimates about 2 million speakers; India's 2011 census counted about 1.5 million. Bodo has been one of India's 22 scheduled languages of the Constitution's Eighth Schedule since 2003, added together with Dogri, Maithili and Santali, and it is an associate official language of Assam. The Mech of northern West Bengal and eastern Nepal speak a closely related variety.

Bodo's nearest relatives are the Boro-Garo languages; see the Garo collection, and for the languages around it the Assamese, Hindi, Nepali, Manipuri and Khasi pages, the fellow 2003 additions Dogri, Maithili and Santali, and the India 🇮🇳 country page. India counts money in rupees, ₹.