Marathi Alphabet & Letters

Marathi is written in Devanagari, the script it shares with Hindi, Sanskrit, Nepali and Konkani; the Marathi style of it is called Balbodh (बाळबोध). Letters hang from a headline, the shirorekha, that joins the letters of a word: मराठी, नमस्कार. There are no capital and small letters, and Marathi is read left to right. Marathi fonts draw a few letters, such as ल and श, in their traditional Marathi shapes, which look slightly different from Hindi print, but they are the same characters, so text copied from this page is correct for both languages.

Devanagari is an abugida: every consonant already contains the vowel a, so क is ka and म is ma. Other vowels are written with a sign called a matra. Reciting one consonant with all its vowels is the barakhadi (बाराखडी), the chart every Marathi child learns: क का कि की कु कू के कै को कौ कं कः. The ि of कि is written before the consonant although it is pronounced after it. The full vowel letters अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ए ऐ ओ औ are used only where a syllable begins with a vowel, as in आई (mother), ऊस (sugarcane), उंदीर (mouse).

How many letters does the Marathi varnamala have? A common school chart counts 12 swar (अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ए ऐ ओ औ अं अः) and 36 vyanjan (the 34 consonants क to ळ plus the conjuncts क्ष and ज्ञ), which makes 48. Many charts also list ऋ, and newer ones add ॲ and ऑ for English words, so you will see other totals; the characters on this page cover all of them. Spoken Marathi, like Hindi, drops many written a's: नमस्कार is said namaskār and घर is ghar.

Marathi consonants: ळ, the two sounds of च, ज्ञ and the eyelash ra

The consonants are arranged by where they are made in the mouth: क ख ग घ ङ in the throat, च छ ज झ ञ at the palate, ट ठ ड ढ ण with the tongue curled back, त थ द ध न at the teeth, प फ ब भ म at the lips, then य र ल व, श ष स ह, and at the very end ळ. Each row runs plain, aspirated, voiced, voiced aspirated and nasal. In everyday Marathi ष sounds like श, and ङ ञ appear mostly in Sanskrit words.

ळ is Marathi's own letter: an l said with the tongue curled back, and very common. It is in डोळा (eye), बाळ (baby), शाळा (school), सकाळ (morning) and मंगळवार (Tuesday), and it changes meanings: काल is yesterday, काळ is time. Konkani writes the same letter, Gujarati has ળ and Kannada ಳ; Hindi lacks it, which is why Hindi charts often leave it out. Marathi also has two sounds for च, ज and झ: in many native words they are said ts, dz and dzh, as in चहा (tea, tsahā) and चार (four, tsār), while before i, e and y and in Sanskrit words they sound like English ch and j, as in चिमणी (sparrow). The spelling does not show which; speakers simply know.

The virama ् removes the built-in a so that consonants can join: स् + क = स्क, क् + ष = क्ष. The conjunct ज्ञ is said dnya in Marathi, which is why the poet ज्ञानेश्वर is spelled Dnyaneshwar in English, while Hindi says gya. र has three joined forms. Before a consonant it usually rides on top as a hook, the reph: कार्य (work), सूर्य (sun). After a consonant it is a small stroke: प्र, क्र. And Marathi alone also uses the eyelash ra र्‍, a short curve before य or ह, as in तऱ्हा (way, manner), दऱ्या (valleys) and वाऱ्याने (by the wind). On computers it is stored either as ऱ (U+0931) followed by the virama, as in this page's examples, or as र, ्, and an invisible zero-width joiner; fonts draw both as the eyelash. If your keyboard has no key for it, copy ऱ from the grid and add ्.

Marathi vowels for English words, the anusvara, and Marathi punctuation

English brought two vowels that Marathi writes with a half-moon. ॲ and its matra ॅ are the a of bat: बॅट, बॅग, कॅमेरा, ॲप. ऑ and ॉ are the o of ball: ऑफिस, डॉक्टर, कॉलेज, कॉफी. Hindi writes the bat vowel as ऍ, built on ए; Marathi builds it on अ, and Unicode added the separate letter ॲ (U+0972) in 2008 for Marathi. Marathi normally writes English f and z without the nukta, the dot underneath: फोन, झू.

Marathi uses the anusvara ं for nasal sounds, as in आंबा (mango), अंगण (courtyard) and मंगळ, and does not use the candrabindu ँ. In informal writing an anusvara at the end of a word marks the spoken neuter ending: माझं, केलं, आलं for the formal माझे, केले, आले. The visarga ः appears in Sanskrit words such as दुःख (sorrow) and अंतःकरण (heart), and the avagraha ऽ marks an elided vowel in Sanskrit or a drawn-out sound.

Modern Marathi prose ends a sentence with an ordinary full stop: मी घरी जातो. Commas, question and exclamation marks and quotation marks are the English ones too, and abbreviations take a dot: डॉ., श्री., सौ. The danda । and the double danda ॥ live on in poetry and prayer, above all in the abhangs of Tukaram and Dnyaneshwar, whose verses close with ॥ and a verse number: ॥१॥. Marathi has its own Devanagari digits ० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९, which you will see in calendars, school books and traditional texts, while 0–9 are just as common. For a danda, please use the real । and not the vertical bar |, which search and screen readers treat as a different character.

How to type Marathi on a laptop, phone and WhatsApp

Windows: Settings → Time & language → Language & region → Add a language → Marathi, then choose a keyboard. Marathi is the government InScript layout with fixed key mappings (d is the virama); some Marathi typing exams use Remington Marathi. Marathi Phonetic lets you type Marathi on an English keyboard: namaskar becomes नमस्कार. Switch with Windows + Space; the same keyboard types Marathi in MS Word. Windows' built-in Marathi fonts are Nirmala UI and Mangal, and the English (India) layout gives ₹ with Right Alt + 4.

Mac: System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources → add the Devanagari (InScript) or Devanagari – QWERTY input source; they are listed under Hindi but type Marathi as well. iPhone: Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards → Add New Keyboard → Marathi. Android: in Gboard or SwiftKey add Marathi (मराठी) and pick the transliteration option to type kase aahat and get कसे आहात. WhatsApp, Instagram and SMS use whichever keyboard your phone has; there is no separate WhatsApp setting.

Old fonts: older Marathi documents and some offices still use pre-Unicode fonts such as Shree-Lipi and Kruti Dev, which draw Marathi shapes over Latin letters. Text typed in them turns into a jumble of Latin letters when pasted elsewhere. Unicode Marathi, the kind on this page and in Mangal or Nirmala UI, pastes correctly anywhere, including into Instagram bios and PDF forms. In HTML, ळ is ळ, ॲ is ॲ, ॥ is ॥ and ₹ is ₹.

Where the Marathi language is spoken

Marathi is the language of Maharashtra, the state created on 1 May 1960 for Marathi speakers, with Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur and Nashik among its cities; it is the state's official language. It is also widely used in Goa alongside Konkani, and large Marathi communities live in the neighbouring states, around Belagavi in Karnataka, in Indore and Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh and in Vadodara in Gujarat. Marathi is one of the 22 languages of India's Eighth Schedule, and in October 2024 the government of India recognised it as a classical language.

Speaker numbers are estimates. India's 2011 census counted about 83 million people with Marathi as their mother tongue, the third-largest language of India after Hindi and Bangla; CLDR estimates about 99 million users. Outside India there are Marathi communities in the United States (about 107,000 people aged 5+ reporting Marathi at home in the 2017–2021 ACS), Australia, Canada, Mauritius, Oman, the United Kingdom and Israel, where the Bene Israel Jews, whose families came from the Konkan coast, have kept Marathi alive, mostly among older speakers and in community publications.

Marathi has a long written history: the Dnyaneshwari, Dnyaneshwar's Marathi commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, dates from 1290. For centuries letters and records were written in the cursive Modi script, which Unicode added in 2014, while Balbodh Devanagari became the script of print and, in the twentieth century, of all Marathi writing. Regional varieties include Varhadi in Vidarbha and Ahirani in Khandesh; the standard language is based on the speech of the Pune region. See also the collections for Hindi, Konkani, Gujarati, Kannada, Telugu and Nepali, and the country page for India 🇮🇳.