Symboler
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Garo alphabet
The Latin letters Garo is written with, in their usual order. Ch and ng are single sounds written with two letters (ch after b, ng after n), so C only ever appears in ch.
The raka and punctuation
The raka (·) marks the glottal stop, as in A·chik. Quotation marks follow English practice.
Currency
Indian rupee in the Garo Hills, Bangladeshi taka across the border.
Where it's spoken
Largest Garo-speaking population first.
Garo Hills in emoji
Wangala drums and the rice harvest, the hills, their elephants and the wild orange of Nokrek.
På kortet
Indlæser…
The Garo alphabet: Latin letters and one raised dot
Garo, which its speakers call A·chik after the A·chik people, is written today almost entirely in the Latin alphabet. Schools in the Garo Hills, newspapers, hymnbooks, the Bible, government notices and the messages people send each other all use it. Unlike most languages on this site, Garo needs no accented letters at all: á, ñ or ü never appear in a Garo word.
What it does need is a short list of letters and one extra mark. The sounds written ch (as in A·chik) and ng are single sounds spelled with two letters, which is why the symbol grid above labels them as rows of their own and why C turns up only inside ch. Letters such as F, V and Z belong to borrowed words and names, not to Garo itself.
The first Garo books printed in the nineteenth century used the Bengali script, and that is still the script Unicode’s CLDR data lists for the language. Baptist missionaries working from Tura soon switched to Latin letters, and the Latin alphabet won. In Bangladesh some Garo writing still appears in Bengali script; for those letters see the Bangla Alphabet & Letters page.
The raka (·): the dot in A·chik
The one character a Garo writer reaches for that an English writer never does is the raka, a small dot raised to the middle of the line: ·. It marks a glottal stop, the brief catch in the throat you hear in the middle of English “uh-oh”. You see it in the name of the people themselves, A·chik, and in A·chik Mande, “Garo people”.
In Unicode the raka is the ordinary middle dot, U00B7, the same character Catalan uses in l·l (see Catalan Letters & Accents). It is not a full stop, and it should not be swapped for look-alikes such as the bullet •, the bullet operator or the dot operator : those are different characters, so a word typed with one of them will not match the same word typed with the real middle dot when someone searches for it.
Because the raka is not among the main keys of most phone keyboards, it is easy to leave out, or to replace with a full stop, a hyphen or an apostrophe in a quick message. In names, titles and anything printed it is worth getting right: copy it from this page or set it up once as a shortcut.
How to type the Garo raka and letters
Every Garo letter is on an ordinary English keyboard, so the only character to learn is the raka. On Windows, hold Alt and type 0183 on the numeric keypad; in Microsoft Word you can also type 00B7 and press AltX. On a Mac with the US layout, press OptionShift9.
On Android and iPhone the easiest route is a text replacement: copy · from this page, then add a shortcut in your keyboard settings (Settings › General › Keyboard › Text Replacement on iPhone; the personal dictionary or clipboard pins in Gboard) so that typing, say, .. gives the dot. In web pages write · or ·.
Where Garo is spoken
Garo is a Sino-Tibetan language of the Boro-Garo branch, so its close relatives are Bodo, Kokborok, Rabha and Dimasa rather than its neighbours Khasi or Bangla. CLDR estimates about 870,000 speakers: roughly 750,000 in India and 120,000 in Bangladesh. Indian census counts run higher, so treat these as rough figures.
Its heartland is the Garo Hills of western Meghalaya, where Tura is the main town and Garo is recognised for official use alongside English; Garo villages also lie in neighbouring Assam and Tripura. In Bangladesh Garo communities live just south of the border, in the Mymensingh region and the Madhupur forest. The written standard grew out of the A·we dialect, the one the missionaries first wrote down.
For the neighbouring languages see the Khasi, Bodo, Assamese and Bangla pages, and for the two countries the India and Bangladesh emoji pages.
Garo in emoji: Wangala, the hills and two flags
There is no Garo flag emoji, so people use and and the emoji of Garo life. is the one that says Wangala, the post-harvest festival when villages thank Saljong, the sun god, with long dama drums, gongs and dancing; the Hundred Drums Wangala festival near Tura gathers drum troupes from across the hills every year. goes with it, since Wangala is the thanksgiving for the rice harvest.
stands for the Garo Hills themselves, for the wild elephants of its forests and of Balpakram and Nokrek national parks, and for Nokrek’s wild orange, Citrus indica, which is protected by a gene sanctuary in the reserve’s buffer zone. For prices, is the rupee used in the Garo Hills and the taka used by Garo speakers in Bangladesh.
How to use them
5 situationsKlik for at kopiereGaro Alphabet & Letters combos
9Godt at vide
- The Garo raka and the dot in Catalan col·lecció are the same Unicode character, U00B7; even the Greek ano teleia is defined as equivalent to it and normalises to it.
- Garo society is matrilineal: children belong to their mother’s clan, so the familiar Garo surnames such as Sangma, Marak and Momin are clan names passed down through the mother.
- The first printed Garo books used the Bengali script, which is why Unicode’s CLDR still lists Bengali as the script of Garo even though nearly all Garo writing today is in Latin letters.
- The gene sanctuary in Nokrek Biosphere Reserve’s buffer zone was set up to preserve wild Citrus indica, a wild orange of the region’s forests.
Ofte stillede spørgsmål
6garo alphabet a to z?
Garo uses a Latin-based alphabet, with the single sounds ch and ng written as two-letter combinations, and adds one mark, the raka ·. There are no accented letters. Letters like F, V and Z appear only in borrowed words and names.
what script is garo language written in?
The Latin script, in schools, print and online. The earliest Garo books used Bengali script, and some Garo writing in Bangladesh still does.
what is the dot in garo words?
It is the raka, a raised dot that marks a glottal stop, as in A·chik. In Unicode it is the middle dot U00B7.
how to type the raka in garo?
Windows: Alt0183 on the number pad (or 00B7 then AltX in Word). Mac: OptionShift9. Phone: copy · from this page and save it as a text shortcut. HTML: ·.
garo language is spoken in which state?
Mainly in Meghalaya, in the Garo Hills around Tura, with speakers also in Assam and Tripura, and across the border in Bangladesh.
is there a garo emoji?
There is no Garo flag or special Garo emoji. People use or with and for Wangala, for the Garo Hills and for its forests.
