Manipuri Alphabet & Meitei Mayek

Manipuri, called Meiteilon (ꯃꯩꯇꯩꯂꯣꯟ) by its speakers, is the language of the Meitei people of Manipur in north-east India. It belongs to the Tibeto-Burman family, so it is not related to Bangla, Assamese or Hindi, although it borrowed many words from them. It is the official language of Manipur and has been one of India's scheduled languages since 1992.

Manipuri has its own script, Meitei Mayek (also spelled Meetei Mayek). From the 18th century, after the Manipuri court adopted Vaishnavism, the Bengali script took its place, and for most of the 20th century books, newspapers and school texts were printed in Bengali letters. A movement to bring the old script back led the Manipur government to approve a standard 27-letter Meitei Mayek in 1980; it is now taught in schools and appears on signboards, in newspapers and in official use, while plenty of text is still written in the Bengali script.

This page therefore gives both alphabets. CLDR lists Bengali as the default script for Manipuri and also lists Meitei Mayek; Meitei Mayek is the script that lonsum and cheitap belong to, and the one the revival and the schools now promote as the Manipuri alphabet.

Meitei Mayek letters: Iyek Ipee, Lom Iyek, Lonsum and Cheitap

The 18 original letters, Iyek Ipee, are ꯀ ꯁ ꯂ ꯃ ꯄ ꯅ ꯆ ꯇ ꯈ ꯉ ꯊ ꯋ ꯌ ꯍ ꯎ ꯏ ꯐ ꯑ. Each has a name rather than just a sound, and the names are those of parts of the body, starting at the top: kok ꯀ (head), sam ꯁ (hair), lai ꯂ (forehead), mit ꯃ (eye), pa ꯄ (eyelash), na ꯅ (ear) and so on down. Learners recite them in this order, "kok, sam, lai, mit, pa, na…", so the body-part names are an easy way to remember the alphabet.

Nine Lom Iyek letters, ꯒ ꯓ ꯔ ꯕ ꯖ ꯗ ꯘ ꯙ ꯚ (gok, jham, rai, ba, jil, dil, ghou, dhou, bham), were added for the voiced and breathy sounds of loanwords; together with Iyek Ipee they make the 27 letters of the standard alphabet. Eight Lonsum Iyek, ꯛ ꯜ ꯝ ꯞ ꯟ ꯠ ꯡ ꯢ, are the shapes k, l, m, p, n, t, ng and i take when they close a syllable, as in ꯀꯪꯂꯩꯄꯥꯛ (Kangleipak, the old name of Manipur), whose last letter is the lonsum ꯛ. Meitei has both open and closed syllables; open CV syllables are most common.

The eight Cheitap Iyek signs comprise seven vowel signs: ꯣ (onap, o), ꯤ (inap, i), ꯥ (aatap, aa), ꯦ (yetnap, e), ꯧ (sounap, ou), ꯨ (unap, u) and ꯩ (cheinap, ei); ꯪ (nung) is the anusvara sign used for final ng. A bare consonant is read with a short a: ꯀ is ka, ꯀꯤ is ki, ꯀꯨ is ku. A word that begins with a vowel puts the sign on ꯑ (atiya), as in ꯑꯃꯥ (ama, one). Unlike the Bengali ি, no Meitei Mayek vowel sign is written before its consonant. Three more signs complete the set: ꯭ (apun iyek), which joins two consonants into a cluster, ꯬ (lum iyek), the mark for the heavy tone, and ꯫ (cheikhei), the full stop.

Manipuri in the Bengali script

Bengali-script Manipuri uses the familiar vowels অ আ ই ঈ উ ঊ ঋ এ ঐ ও ঔ with their signs া ি ী ু ূ ৃ ে ৈ ো ৌ, the consonants from ক to হ, and the signs ং ঃ ঁ ্ ়. Manipuri writes w with ৱ, as in ৱাংখেই (Wangkhei, a part of Imphal). Unicode names it BENGALI LETTER RA WITH LOWER DIAGONAL; it is the same character Assamese uses. Manipuri spells r with the Bangla র, not the Assamese ৰ.

Because Manipuri sounds differ from those of Bengali, several letters stand for the same sound: the aspirated and breathy consonants and the long and short vowels are kept mainly in words borrowed from Sanskrit and Bengali. Sentences end with the danda ।; Bengali digits ০ ১ ২ ৩ ৪ ৫ ৬ ৭ ৮ ৯ appear in older books, although 0–9 are widely used today as well.

If you write Bangla or Assamese, the Bangla Alphabet and Assamese Alphabet collections share almost every character in this group, so the same keyboard and fonts serve all three.

How to type Manipuri and Meitei Mayek

Meitei Mayek has been in Unicode since version 5.2 (2009), in the block U+ABC0–U+ABFF, so it can be typed, searched and sent like any other script. A second block, Meetei Mayek Extensions (U+AAE0–U+AAFF, Unicode 6.0), holds letters of older manuscripts that the modern 27-letter alphabet does not use; they are not needed for everyday Manipuri and are left out of this page.

On a phone, keyboards such as Gboard list Manipuri among their languages; add it, choose the Meitei Mayek or the Bengali-script version, and type into WhatsApp, Facebook or SMS directly. On a computer, you need a keyboard layout that includes the script you want; the Bengali-script letters can be typed on any Bengali keyboard, while for Meitei Mayek, if your system offers none, copy the letters from this page. To display Meitei Mayek, install a Unicode font such as Google's free Noto Sans Meetei Mayek.

Older Manipuri documents were often typed in non-Unicode fonts that draw Manipuri shapes on top of English letters; copied out, such text turns into Latin gibberish and must be converted or retyped. Everything on this page is Unicode. HTML: ꯀ for ꯀ, ꯫ for the full stop ꯫, ꯱ for ꯱, ৱ for ৱ, । for । and ₹ for ₹.

Manipuri numbers, punctuation and the rupee

Meitei Mayek has its own digits, the cheising iyek: ꯰ ꯱ ꯲ ꯳ ꯴ ꯵ ꯶ ꯷ ꯸ ꯹, written in the same place-value system as 0–9, so 2026 is ꯲꯰꯲꯶. Counting from one to ten in Manipuri: ama, ani, ahum, mari, manga, taruk, taret, nipan, mapan, tara.

In Meitei Mayek a sentence ends with the cheikhei ꯫; texts in the Bengali script use the danda । and, for verse, the double danda ॥. Commas, question marks and quotation marks “ ” ‘ ’ are the international ones.

Manipuri is spoken by an estimated 1.6 million people (CLDR estimate): about 1.55 million in India, above all in Manipur and also in Assam and Tripura, and a community of roughly 19,000 in Bangladesh, mostly around Sylhet; there are Meitei communities in Myanmar too. Prices are written with the Indian rupee ₹ in India and the taka ৳ in Bangladesh; more on both countries in the India and Bangladesh collections.