Maharashtrian Konkani Alphabet

Konkani is spoken along India's west coast, especially across Maharashtra, Goa and coastal Karnataka, with smaller communities in Kerala. The ISO 639-3 standard treats Konkani as a macrolanguage (code kok) with two members: Goan Konkani (gom), the variety behind the Goan standard, and knn, catalogued as "Konkani (individual language)" and usually called Maharashtrian Konkani: the Konkani spoken on the Konkan coast of Maharashtra, in districts such as Raigad, Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg.

This is the Konkani that sits closest to Marathi, the state language of Maharashtra. Its speakers live among Marathi, often go to Marathi-medium schools and commonly write with Marathi spelling habits, so the questions people search, "is Konkani a dialect of Marathi?" and "how to write Konkani in Marathi", come up most often about exactly these varieties. Linguists class Konkani as a language of its own, and India recognises it as one; on the Maharashtra coast the line between the two is drawn differently by different speakers and surveys.

Speaker numbers are estimates. CLDR, the Unicode project's locale data, estimates about 5 million users of this Konkani, all in India. Counts vary widely because many people on the coast report their mother tongue as Marathi; India's 2011 census recorded about 2.3 million Konkani speakers for all varieties together.

The Konkani alphabet in Devanagari: vowels, matras and consonants

Konkani in Maharashtra and Goa is written in Devanagari, the script of Marathi, Hindi, Nepali and Sanskrit. Letters hang from a headline that joins the letters of a word: कोंकणी, नमस्कार. There are no capital and small letters, and the script runs left to right. Konkani is also written in Roman letters (Romi), Kannada and Malayalam scripts; Roman is used by Goan Christians too.

Devanagari is an abugida: each consonant carries the vowel a, so क is ka and म is ma. Another vowel is written with a matra on the consonant: का kā, कि ki, की kī, कु ku, कू kū, के ke, कै kai, को ko, कौ kau. The ि of कि comes before the consonant on paper although it is said after it. The full vowel letters अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ए ऐ ओ औ start a syllable: आंबो (mango), इतिहास (history). ऋ ृ and ऌ belong to Sanskrit words, as in ऋतू (season).

The consonants are arranged 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, श ष स ह. Each row runs plain, aspirated, voiced, voiced aspirated and nasal. The virama ् removes the built-in a so consonants can join: म् + ह gives म्ह, स् + त gives स्त in नमस्ते. Your font draws the joined shapes; you only type the letters and the virama.

ळ, ऑ, the anusvara and Konkani punctuation

ळ is a retroflex l made with the tongue curled back, written in Konkani as in Marathi. It is everyday Konkani: दिवाळी (Diwali), शाळा (school), वेळ (time), and the Sindhudurg town of कुडाळ (Kudal). Hindi spells the festival दिवाली with a plain ल; on the Konkan coast it is दिवाळी. In HTML ळ is ळ.

English words bring two vowels that Devanagari writes with a half-moon: ऑ ॉ for the o of college and doctor (कॉलेज, डॉक्टर) and ऍ ॅ for the a of bat and bank (बॅट, बॅंक). Hindi, Marathi and Konkani all use them for English loanwords. The anusvara ं writes nasal sounds, as in कोंकण and आंबो, and Konkani spellings use it often; the candrabindu ँ is rarer. The visarga ः and the avagraha ऽ appear in Sanskrit words and prayers, and ॐ opens many of them.

Everyday Konkani prose uses the full stop, comma, question and exclamation marks of English, as modern Marathi does. The danda । and double danda ॥ belong to verse, devotional songs and older texts. Numbers can be written with Devanagari digits ० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९ or with 0–9, and prices with the rupee sign ₹ (₹).

How to type Konkani on a computer and phone

Windows: Settings → Time & language → Language & region → Add a language, and add Konkani, Marathi or Hindi; each gives a Devanagari keyboard that types every letter on this page. The InScript layout has one key per letter, with the virama on d. If you prefer to type by sound on an English keyboard, Hindi Phonetic works for Konkani too, because the letters are the same. Switch keyboards with Windows + Space.

Mac: System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources → add Hindi and choose Devanagari, Devanagari – QWERTY or Hindi – Transliteration. Phones: in Gboard, SwiftKey or the iPhone keyboard settings, add Marathi or Hindi (or Konkani, where your keyboard lists it) with a transliteration layout, then type konkani and pick कोंकणी. WhatsApp and Instagram use whatever keyboard the phone has.

To write Konkani the way Marathi is written, the usual habit on the Maharashtra coast, you need nothing extra: Marathi and Konkani share the same Devanagari letters, including ळ, ऍ and ऑ. For single characters, copy them from the grid above.

Konkani and Marathi: difference and related collections

Konkani and Marathi are both Indo-Aryan languages of western India and share much vocabulary, so speakers can often follow some of each other's speech. They differ in grammar and everyday words: Goan standard Konkani says आनी for "and" where Marathi says आणि, and Konkani nouns often end in -ओ where Marathi ones end in -आ, as in Konkani आंबो and Marathi आंबा, "mango". Maharashtrian Konkani varieties sit between the two in many such features.

For the Goan standard and the Konkani of Karnataka and Kerala, see the Konkani collection; for the state language of Maharashtra, Marathi; for the same script in North India, Hindi; and for flags, the rupee and the emoji of the whole country, India.