Eastern Magar Letters & Script

The Magar language is written today in Devanagari, the script of Nepali, and with the same letters that Nepali uses. Devanagari is the regular script for Magar Dhut, though Akkha is also reported in use. There is no separate Magar alphabet in Unicode and no special Magar font is needed: any font that covers Devanagari, such as the ones built into Windows, macOS, Android and iOS, writes Magar.

You will also see the Akkha script (अक्खा लिपि, Akkha lipi), which some Magar organisations promote as a script of their own and teach in workshops and on signboards. Akkha has no separate Unicode encoding; special font mappings can display it, but the resulting text may not be portable across devices. For interoperable text that can be searched across devices, Devanagari is the regular choice for Magar.

Magar alphabet: vowels, matras and consonants

Devanagari is an abugida: every consonant already carries the vowel a, so म is ma and ग is ga, and the word मगर (Magar) is simply म + ग + र. Other vowels are added as signs called matras: 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 only where a syllable starts with a vowel, as in the surname आले (Ale). ऋ and its sign ृ appear only in words borrowed from Nepali and Sanskrit.

The 33 consonants run in the traditional order by where they are made in the mouth: 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. Writers of Nepal's Tibeto-Burman languages lean on ङ (nga) far more than Hindi does, for the ng sound in names such as स्याङ्जा (Syangja), लमजुङ (Lamjung) and गुरुङ (Gurung). Nepali spelling, which Magar follows, has no dotted letters: बुढा, not बुढ़ा, so the nukta ़ and ड़ ढ़ are not needed.

The virama ् removes the built-in a so that consonants can join, as in स्याङ्जा and घर्ती (Gharti). The candrabindu ँ marks a nasal vowel, as at the end of तनहुँ (Tanahun), and the anusvara ं a nasal before a consonant. Sentences end with the danda ।, the Nepali full stop, and the double danda ॥ closes verses and hymns. Nepal uses its own digits ० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९ more than India does: dates in the Bikram Sambat calendar and official papers are often written with them.

Eastern Magar, Western Magar and Magar Kham

Magar is not one language but several, all spoken by the Magar people. The largest is Magar Dhut (मगर ढुट), the language of the old Barha Magarat (बाह्र मगरात, "the twelve Magar lands") of the central and western hills. Linguists split it in two, Eastern Magar (code mgp, this page) and Western Magar (code mrd), which has a collection of its own. Further west, in the Athara Magarat ("the eighteen Magar lands") of Rolpa and Rukum, many Magars speak Magar Kham, a separate language that a Magar Dhut speaker does not simply understand.

All of them belong to the Sino-Tibetan (Tibeto-Burman) family, with languages such as Newari, Tamang, Gurung, Limbu and Tibetan, and are not related to Nepali, an Indo-Aryan language close to Hindi. Magar borrowed Devanagari from Nepali, and most Magar speakers today also speak Nepali, so Magar texts mix in Nepali words freely. See also the collections for Western Magar, Nepali, Newari, Western Tamang, Limbu, Bantawa and Tibetan, and the country page for Nepal 🇳🇵.

How to type the Magar language on a keyboard and phone

Magar is typed with a Nepali keyboard, because the letters are the same. Windows: Settings → Time & language → Language & region → add Nepali, which brings the Nepali layout with one key per letter; switch with Windows + Space. Many people in Nepal instead install the free Nepali Unicode Romanized layout, where keys follow their Latin sounds (k → क, m → म). Older documents were often typed in the Preeti font, which only draws Latin letters as Devanagari shapes: copy such text out of its file and it turns into Latin gibberish, so convert it to Unicode before you post it.

Mac: System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources → add Devanagari or Devanagari – QWERTY, which type every letter Magar needs, or Hindi – Transliteration to type in Latin letters and get Devanagari. Phones: Gboard and SwiftKey on Android have a Nepali keyboard, including a mode where you type in Latin letters and pick the Devanagari word; on an iPhone the Hindi keyboard writes the same letters.

For one-off characters, copy them from this page. In HTML, the danda । is ।, the double danda ॥ is ॥ and ₨ is ₨. Please do not use the vertical bar | for a danda: it looks close, but search, screen readers and line breaking treat it as a different character. Nepali and Magar writers also write the rupee as रु (the letters र + ु), which is the usual form on Nepali price tags.

Where the Eastern Magar language is spoken

Eastern Magar is spoken in the middle hills of Nepal, in Magar villages of the Gandaki and Lumbini hills and in scattered communities further east. CLDR lists an estimated population of about 340,000 for Magar (mgp), and no longer lists Western Magar (mrd) separately. The Magars themselves number around two million, about 7 percent of Nepal's population and one of its largest ethnic groups, but fewer than half of them still speak Magar as their mother tongue; the rest grew up speaking Nepali. Nepal's 2015 constitution declares every mother tongue spoken in the country a national language, Magar included.

Magars also live in India, above all in Sikkim, which lists Mangar among its official languages, and in Darjeeling, as well as in southern Bhutan and among Gurkha families in Britain and Hong Kong. Nepal's currency is the Nepalese rupee, written ₨ or रु; in India Magars pay in ₹.

Magar culture in emoji: Maghi, Kaura and the Gurkhas

The great festival of the Magars is Maghe Sankranti (Maghi), on the first day of the month of Magh in mid-January, when families gather and eat sweet potato and yam, sesame sweets and ghee; 🍠 is the emoji people send with माघे संक्रान्तिको शुभकामना. Songs and dances are central to Magar gatherings, above all the Kaura dance to the madal drum, for which 🪘 and 💃 stand in.

Magars have served as Gurkha soldiers since the nineteenth century, today in the British and Indian armies as well as Nepal's own, and the curved khukuri knife 🗡️ and the medal 🎖️ are how Magar families mark that history. Common Magar surnames are worth getting right in Devanagari: थापा (Thapa), राना (Rana), आले (Ale), पुन (Pun), बुढा (Budha), रोका (Roka) and घर्ती (Gharti).