Magahi Alphabet & Letters

Magahi (मगही, also called Magadhi) is written today in Devanagari, the same script as Hindi, Bhojpuri and Maithili: left to right, with the letters hanging from a line along the top (the shirorekha). The alphabet is the familiar Indian set: the vowels अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ऋ ए ऐ ओ औ, each with a sign (matra) for use after a consonant (का कि की कु कू के कै को कौ), and the consonants in the old phonetic grid, from क ख ग घ ङ through प फ ब भ म to य र ल व श ष स ह, plus ड़ and ढ़.

Every consonant carries a built-in a, so म alone is ma. The virama ् removes it, and two consonants then join into a conjunct: क + ् + ष = क्ष, त + ् + र = त्र, प + ् + र = प्र. Alphabet charts often add क्ष त्र ज्ञ श्र at the end, but they are joined pairs, not separate letters, and you type them as two letters with a virama between.

Magahi shows its own character in its words and grammar, written in these same Devanagari letters. Like the other Bihari languages, Magahi often spells its diphthongs as two vowels where Hindi writes ऐ and औ, as in अउर "and" and पइसा "money", and it has its own pronouns and endings: हमर "my" and तोहर "your" where Hindi says मेरा and तेरा.

Special letters and signs: ड़ ढ़, ँ ं and ऽ

ड़ and ढ़ are flaps: the tongue curls back and strikes once, like a quick r. They are everywhere in Magahi, as in बड़ "big", गाड़ी "cart, car" and पढ़ाई "study". The dot under them is the nukta ़. Unicode has two ways to write each: a single character (U+095C ड़, U+095D ढ़) or ड / ढ followed by the nukta. They look the same, and Unicode normalization turns the single character into the two-part form, so search and spell checkers treat them as one.

Nasal vowels are marked with the candrabindu ँ (moon and dot): गाँव "village", कहाँ "where". The anusvara ं (a dot alone) stands for a nasal before a consonant: गंगा "Ganga", संगीत "music"; when a matra already sits above the line, writers use the plain dot for both, as in में and नहीं. ङ ञ ण rarely start a word and appear mostly in Sanskrit spellings, and the visarga ः only in Sanskrit words such as दुःख "sorrow".

In Sanskrit the avagraha ऽ marks a lost a. Magahi writers also put it after a word to mark a final inherent vowel that would otherwise be omitted in spelling. It is easy to miss on a keyboard, so it is in the grid here.

Kaithi: the old script of Magadh

Before Devanagari took over in the 20th century, Magahi was usually written in Kaithi (कैथी), the script of the Kayastha scribes. Across Bihar it was used for letters, shop accounts, land records and court papers, and in the 19th century the British administration made it a script of the courts in Bihar. It is related to Devanagari but has a different letter inventory and forms; unlike Devanagari, it has no headstroke: 𑂧 ma, 𑂏 ga, 𑂯 ha, 𑂥 ba.

Kaithi entered Unicode in version 5.2 (2009), in the block U+11080–U+110CF, and fonts such as Noto Sans Kaithi display it; without one you see empty boxes. It still matters because many old land deeds and records in Bihar are written in it and few people can still read them. The Kaithi tables on this page follow a similar order to the Devanagari ones above, but Kaithi writes vocalic r with the letter for ra plus the vowel sign for ii rather than a separate vowel letter. There is no separate Magahi alphabet: Magahi is written in Devanagari and, historically, in Kaithi.

How to type Magahi on a keyboard and phone

There is no separate Magahi keyboard: Magahi uses the Hindi (Devanagari) keyboards. On Windows, add Hindi under Settings → Time & language → Language & region and choose a Devanagari INSCRIPT layout or the Hindi phonetic keyboard, where you type in Latin letters and pick the Devanagari word; switch with Win+Space. On a Mac, add Devanagari, Devanagari – QWERTY or Hindi – Transliteration under System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources.

On a phone, add Hindi to Gboard or SwiftKey. Its transliteration mode lets you type pranam and pick प्रणाम from the suggestions, a common way to write Magahi song captions and WhatsApp messages. If your keyboard lacks ऽ, । ॥ or the Devanagari digits ० to ९, copy them here.

In HTML any letter can be written by its code: म is म, ड़ is ड़, ऽ is the avagraha ऽ, । is the danda । and 𑂧 is Kaithi 𑂧.

Where the Magahi language is spoken

Magahi is the language of the old kingdom of Magadh in south Bihar: Patna, Gaya, Nalanda, Jehanabad, Arwal, Nawada, Aurangabad, Sheikhpura and the districts around them, and across the border in northern Jharkhand, where Khortha is often classed as an eastern form of it. CLDR estimates about 17 million speakers, though Nepal's 2021 census also counted 230,117 Magahi mother-tongue speakers. India's census counts Magahi under Hindi; in 2011 about 13 million people named it as their mother tongue, and many of them also speak Hindi.

It descends from Magadhi Prakrit, the speech of ancient Magadha, whose capitals were Rajgir and Pataliputra, today's Patna. Its closest relatives are Bhojpuri and Maithili, grouped with it as the Bihari languages; for the same Devanagari letters in neighbouring languages see the Hindi, Bhojpuri, Maithili and Awadhi collections, and for the flag, ₹ and emoji the India collection.