Limbu Script & Alphabet

Limbu, or Yakthung pan as its speakers call it, is a Kiranti language of the Sino-Tibetan family, a relative of Bantawa and the other Rai languages of the eastern Nepal hills. Unlike most of its neighbours it has an alphabet of its own with a long written history. Limbu tradition credits a ninth-century king, Sirijunga Hang, with creating it, and says that Te-ongsi Sirijunga Xin Thebe revived it in the eighteenth century; that is why the script is called Sirijunga (also spelled Srijanga or Sirijonga). The oldest Limbu manuscripts that survive date from the eighteenth century.

The script descends from the Brahmi family of India, like Devanagari and Tibetan, but its letters are its own: compact, rounded shapes with no headline. The modern form grew out of a revival that began in Kalimpong in 1925 and was refined in the 1970s; it is the form used today in schoolbooks, newspapers, songs and the Mundhum, the Limbu body of ritual and oral tradition.

Unicode added the Limbu block, U+1900–U+194F, in version 4.0 in 2003, so every character on this page is real text that pastes into messages, documents and social media. Plenty of Limbu writing is also done in Devanagari, the script of Nepali; for those letters see the Nepali collection.

How Limbu letters work: the vowel carrier, vowel signs and final letters

Each Limbu consonant carries a built-in vowel. In modern Limbu it is an open aw sound, so bare ᤁ reads closer to kɔ than ka, even though Unicode names the letters ka, kha, ga following the Limbu practice of writing their letter names in Devanagari. Vowel signs, typed after the consonant, change it: ᤁᤠ ka, ᤁᤡ ki, ᤁᤢ ku, ᤁᤣ ke, ᤁᤤ kai, ᤁᤥ ko, ᤁᤦ kau. The signs named EE ᤣ and E ᤧ, and OO ᤥ and O ᤨ, separate a closer and a more open e and o. A sign may appear above, below or beside the letter, but it is always typed after it.

There are no independent vowel letters; syllable-initial vowels use the vowel carrier ᤀ. A word that starts with a vowel puts the vowel sign on ᤀ, so ᤀᤡ is a plain i. Three subjoined letters, ᤩ ya, ᤪ ra and ᤫ wa, attach below a consonant to make clusters such as ᤁᤩ kya and ᤁᤪ kra.

A syllable that ends in a consonant uses one of the small final letters: ᤰ k, ᤱ ng, ᤳ t, ᤴ n, ᤵ p, ᤶ m, ᤷ r, ᤸ l and the small anusvara ᤲ. So ᤐᤠᤴ is pan, “language”, and ᤗᤡᤶᤒᤢ is Limbu. The two letters at the end of the consonant row, ᤝ gyan and ᤞ tra, stand for the Sanskrit-style clusters jña and tra; they were added by the Limbu scholar Iman Singh Chemjong, dropped from modern spelling in B. B. Subba's 1970s revision, and encoded in Unicode later because they appear in older charts.

Limbu signs, punctuation and numbers

Three small signs do jobs no Latin letter does. Kemphreng ᤺, drawn above the syllable, marks a long vowel. Mukphreng ᤹, written low, marks a glottal stop, a brief catch in the throat that can tell two words apart. Sa-i ᤻, written under a full-size final consonant, removes its vowel; in the spelling used in Sikkim it also marks the vowel before it as long, where writers in Nepal usually use kemphreng with a small final letter. The sign ᥀ writes the exclamatory particle lo, which is now more often spelled out as ᤗᤥ.

Limbu has its own exclamation mark ᥄ and question mark ᥅. Limbu's main punctuation mark is the Devanagari double danda ॥.

Limbu digits work like Western ones, one sign per digit, left to right: ᥆ ᥇ ᥈ ᥉ ᥊ ᥋ ᥌ ᥍ ᥎ ᥏ are 0 to 9, so 2026 is ᥈᥆᥈᥌. Prices in Nepal are written with रु or the general rupee sign ₨, and in India with ₹.

How to type the Limbu script: keyboard, fonts and copy and paste

There are no Alt codes or Mac Option shortcuts for Limbu. To type it, install a Limbu keyboard: SIL's Keyman offers a Limbu typewriter layout, and a Limbu (Yakthung) layout published by Translation Commons covers Windows, macOS, Android and iPhone. Type in sound order: consonant, subjoined letter, vowel sign, then kemphreng, the final letter or sa-i. Or tap any character in the grid above to copy it.

To see the letters you need a font with Limbu coverage, such as the free Noto Sans Limbu from Google or SIL's Namdhinggo. Without one, Limbu shows as empty boxes, and a weak setup may show dotted circles next to vowel signs; the text itself is fine. Older Limbu documents made with custom 8-bit fonts need converting to Unicode, since changing the font alone does not fix them. In Microsoft Word you can type a code and press Alt+X, for example 1901 for ᤁ; in HTML write ᤁ.

Where the Limbu language is spoken

Limbu is spoken in Limbuwan, the hill country of eastern Nepal east of the Arun river, in districts such as Taplejung, Panchthar, Ilam, Terhathum and Dhankuta, below Kanchenjunga 🏔️. Across the border it is spoken in Sikkim, where Limboo is one of the state's official languages and the script is taught in schools, and in Darjeeling and Kalimpong. CLDR estimates about 380,000 speakers: about 340,000 in Nepal 🇳🇵 and about 37,000 in India 🇮🇳.

Limbu has several dialects, of which Phedappe, Panthare, Tamarkhole and Chhathare are the best known. Almost all Limbu speakers also speak Nepali, and much everyday writing, especially in chat, uses Devanagari or Latin letters. For related pages see the Bantawa collection, with the Kirat Rai script, the Nepali collection, and the Nepal and India pages for each country's emoji.