Mundari Script: Nag Mundari

Mundari is a Munda language, part of the Austroasiatic family, so its relatives are not Hindi or Bangla but Ho, its closest sister, Santali, Bhumij and the other Munda languages of eastern India. It is the language of the Munda people, and like many languages of India it has been written in whatever script the schools and printers around it used.

Today most printed Mundari in Jharkhand is in Devanagari, the script of Hindi. In Odisha Mundari is also written in the Odia script and in West Bengal in the Bengali script, which Unicode's CLDR data lists as Mundari's default. Christian missionaries wrote it in Roman letters, and the great reference work on the language, the many-volume Encyclopaedia Mundarica of the Jesuit missionary John-Baptist Hoffmann, uses them too.

In the twentieth century the Mundari writer Rohidas Singh Nag made a script for the language itself, Mundari Bani, also called the Mundari Bani lipi (script). When it entered Unicode it was named Nag Mundari after him. Munda writers and community groups use it as a sign of Munda identity, while Devanagari remains the everyday script.

Nag Mundari letters: the Mundari Bani alphabet

Nag Mundari has 27 letters, and unlike Devanagari it writes every vowel as a full letter of its own, the way the Latin alphabet does. Five of the letters are vowels, 𞓐 O, 𞓕 A, 𞓚 I, 𞓟 U, 𞓤 E, and Unicode's order, which the grid follows, puts each vowel at the head of a row of letters whose names begin with it: O, Op, Ol, Oy, Ong; A, Aj, Ab, Any, Ah; I, Is, Idd, It, Ih; U, Uc, Ud, Uk, Ur; and E, Enn, Eg, Em, En, Ett, Ell. The names are not the a-b-c of English, so do not expect each letter to map neatly onto one Latin letter.

There are no capital letters. Beside the letters the script has five signs: 𞓫 Ojod, which Unicode classes as a modifier letter, and four combining marks, 𞓬 Muhor, 𞓭 Toyor, 𞓮 Ikir and 𞓯 Sutuh, which are typed after a letter and drawn on it. Nag Mundari also has its own digits 𞓰 𞓱 𞓲 𞓳 𞓴 𞓵 𞓶 𞓷 𞓸 𞓹 for 0 to 9.

Nag Mundari is in the Unicode Standard since version 15.0 (2022), in the block U+1E4D0–U+1E4FF, which makes it one of the newest scripts of India in Unicode. It joined two scripts of sister languages already there, Ol Chiki for Santali and Warang Citi for Ho.

How to type Mundari Bani: keyboard, font and Unicode

Most computers and phones do not ship a Nag Mundari keyboard, so the quickest way is to copy the letters from this page. Some keyboard apps for Indian languages offer Mundari; search your keyboard app's language list for it. To see the letters you need a font that has them: Google's free Noto Sans Nag Mundari covers the whole script. Without such a font you get empty boxes (tofu) instead of 𞓐 𞓕 𞓚.

Typing by code point works anywhere a font is present. In Microsoft Word type the code, for example 1E4D5 for A, and press Alt + X. On Linux press Ctrl + Shift + U, type 1e4d5 and press Space. In HTML write 𞓕. Windows Alt codes on the number pad do not reach these characters. Every Nag Mundari character lies beyond U+FFFF, so it takes 4 bytes in UTF-8 and counts as 2 in JavaScript's string length; use UTF-8 (utf8mb4 in MySQL) end to end.

Mundari in Devanagari needs no special tools: any Hindi keyboard types it. On Windows add Hindi under Settings → Time & language → Language & region and choose Hindi Traditional (InScript) or Hindi Phonetic; on a Mac add Devanagari or Hindi – Transliteration under Keyboard → Input Sources; on phones add a Hindi keyboard in Gboard, SwiftKey or iOS. The English (India) layout on Windows gives ₹ with Right Alt + 4.

Where the Mundari language is spoken

Mundari is spoken by about 1.3 million people, according to Unicode's CLDR estimate, almost all of them in India. Its heartland is the Chota Nagpur plateau of Jharkhand: the districts of Ranchi, Khunti, Gumla and Simdega and parts of the Singhbhum districts. Many Munda also live in neighbouring Odisha, especially Sundargarh, Mayurbhanj and Keonjhar, and in West Bengal, and large communities grew in the tea gardens of Assam, where Munda families went to work in the nineteenth century.

Mundari is one of the second official languages of Jharkhand. The Munda people's best-known hero is Birsa Munda, born in Ulihatu in today's Khunti district, who led the Ulgulan, the great uprising against British rule and landlords, and died in Ranchi jail in 1900. People call him Dharti Aba, father of the earth, and statues show him with a bow 🏹.

For the neighbouring languages and their characters, see our collections for Ho (Warang Citi), Santali (Ol Chiki), Kurukh, Sadri, Hindi, Odia and Bangla, and the India collection for the flag 🇮🇳, ₹ and the country's emoji.

Mundari emoji: Johar, Sarhul, Karam and the akhra

The greeting across Munda country, and much of Jharkhand, is Johar (जोहार), often written with 🙏. The great spring festival is Sarhul, when the sal trees 🌳 flower and their blossoms 🌼 are offered at the sacred grove and worn in the hair; later in the year comes Karam, when a branch of the Karam tree 🌿 is planted in the village and danced around through the night.

Both festivals happen on the akhra, the village dance ground, to the beat of the barrel-shaped mandar drum 🪘, with long lines of dancers 💃🕺 and songs 🎶. Rice 🌾 is the crop of the Munda villages, and flat and upright stone slabs 🪨 mark the sasandiri, the burial and memorial stones of Munda families. And 🏑 belongs here too: Khunti and Simdega are among India's great nurseries of field hockey players.