Dogri Letters & Script

Dogri, the language of the Dogras of Jammu, is written today in Devanagari, the script of Hindi, Marathi and Nepali. Books, newspapers, school textbooks and the Sahitya Akademi's Dogri publications all use it, and any font that covers Devanagari writes Dogri. The word Dogri itself is written डोगरी.

Before that, Dogri had a script of its own. Like the other hill languages of the western Himalaya it was written in Takri, and in the nineteenth century a regularised form of Takri, the Dogra script or Dogra Akkhar, became an official script of the Jammu and Kashmir state in the reign of Maharaja Ranbir Singh. Dogri was also written in the Perso-Arabic script used for Urdu. The Dogra script went out of everyday use in the twentieth century, but it was added to Unicode in version 11.0 (2018) as its own block, U+11800 to U+1184F, so the name Dogri can again be typed in it: 𑠖𑠵𑠌𑠤𑠮. You need a font with that block, such as Noto Sans Dogra, to see it.

Dogri letters: vowels, matras and consonants

Devanagari is an abugida: every consonant already contains the vowel a, so क is ka and म is ma. Other vowels are signs called matras written before, after, above or below the consonant: का kā, कि ki, की kī, कु ku, कू kū, के ke, कै kai, को ko, कौ kau. The full vowel letters अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ए ऐ ओ औ are used where a syllable starts with a vowel. The vocalic letters ऋ ॠ ऌ ॡ and their signs belong to Sanskrit words and are listed because Unicode's CLDR character set for Dogri includes them.

The consonants are arranged by where they are made in the mouth: क ख ग घ ङ in the throat, च छ ज झ ञ at the palate, ट ठ ड ढ ण with the tongue curled back, त थ द ध न at the teeth, प फ ब भ म at the lips, then य र ल व and श ष स ह. Dogri adds ळ, the retroflex l, and the flapped ड़ written with the nukta dot ़, as in लोहड़ी (Lohri). The Dogra script has a separate letter for that sound, 𑠫.

The virama ् removes the built-in a so consonants can join: ग् + ग = ग्ग, as in डुग्गर. The anusvara ं and candrabindu ँ mark nasal sounds. Sentences end with the danda ।, verses and prayers with the double danda ॥, and numbers can be written with Devanagari digits ० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९ or with ordinary 0–9.

Dogri tones and Vedic signs ॑ and ॒

Dogri is a tonal language, like its neighbour Punjabi: the pitch of a syllable can tell two words apart. The tones grew out of the old voiced aspirated consonants, so letters such as घ, झ, ढ, ध and भ are still written as in Hindi, but in many words they are pronounced as plain g, j, ḍ, d or b with a tone on the syllable instead of a breathy sound.

Dogri marks high-falling tone after short vowels with the modifier letter apostrophe ʼ (U+02BC), and after long vowels with ह (U+0939). The udatta ॑ (U+0951) and anudatta ॒ (U+0952) are Vedic accent signs, not Dogri tone marks. They are combining marks, so type or paste them straight after the letter they belong to. In practice the tone is often carried by the spelling alone, through letters such as घ, झ, ढ, ध and भ, so a separate tone mark is not always written.

How to type Dogri on a keyboard and phone

Because Dogri uses Hindi's letters, you type it with a Hindi keyboard. Windows: Settings → Time & language → Language & region → add Hindi, then choose Hindi Traditional (the InScript standard, one key per letter) or Hindi Phonetic (type in Latin letters and get Devanagari). Switch with Windows + Space. Mac: System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources → add Hindi and pick Devanagari, Devanagari – QWERTY or Hindi – Transliteration. Phones: add a Hindi keyboard in Gboard or SwiftKey on Android, or Hindi on iPhone.

For the Vedic signs and the Dogra script, copy them from this page; ordinary Hindi layouts do not offer them. In HTML the udatta ॑ is ॑, the anudatta ॒ is ॒, the danda । is ।, the double danda ॥ is ॥ and ₹ is ₹. Please do not use the vertical bar | for a danda: it looks close, but search engines and screen readers treat it as a different character.

Where the Dogri language is spoken

Dogri is spoken in the Jammu region of Jammu and Kashmir, in and around Jammu, Kathua, Samba, Udhampur and Reasi, an area Dogras call Duggar (डुग्गर), and in neighbouring parts of Himachal Pradesh and of Punjab around Pathankot. CLDR estimates about 2.8 million speakers in India 🇮🇳; Dogri is also spoken in Pakistan, and India's census counts are of the same order.

Dogri is an Indo-Aryan language of the western Pahari and Punjabi area. George Grierson's Linguistic Survey of India treated it as a dialect of Punjabi, but it has long had its own literature and recognition: the Sahitya Akademi accepted Dogri as an independent literary language in 1969, the 92nd Amendment added it to the Eighth Schedule of India's Constitution in 2003 together with Bodo, Maithili and Santali, and in 2020 it became an official language of the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir alongside Kashmiri, Hindi, Urdu and English. See also the collections for Punjabi, Hindi, Kashmiri and Urdu, and the country page for India, whose currency is the rupee ₹.

Jammu is known as the City of Temples, and the shrine of Vaishno Devi in the hills above Katra draws millions of pilgrims, which is why जय माता दी and 🙏 🛕 turn up in so many Dogri messages. Dogra food is another favourite subject: rajma with rice 🫘🍚, and kalari, a fresh cheese 🧀 from the Jammu hills that is fried and eaten in a kulcha.