Nepali Alphabet & Letters

Nepali is written in Devanagari, the script it shares with Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Maithili and Bhojpuri. Letters hang from a headline that runs along each word (नेपाली, नमस्ते); there are no capital and small letters, and the script is read left to right. The alphabet is called the barnamala (वर्णमाला): Nepali usually says व as b, which is why the word is spelled with va but searched as barnamala.

Devanagari is an abugida: every consonant already contains the vowel a, so क is ka and म is ma. Another vowel is written with a sign called a matra: का kā, कि ki, की kī, कु ku, कू kū, कृ kri, के ke, कै kai, को ko, कौ kau. The ि of कि is written before the consonant although it is spoken after it. The full vowel letters are used where a syllable starts with a vowel: आमा (mother), ऊन (wool), the ए of एक (one).

Nepali charts usually count 36 consonants, the 33 letters from क to ह plus the conjuncts क्ष त्र ज्ञ, and 11 to 13 vowels, depending on whether अं and अः are counted. The letter ळ appears in the full Devanagari set because Sanskrit and Marathi use it; you will not need it for ordinary Nepali.

Nepali spelling: long vowels, the halanta and the nasal marks

Spoken Nepali does not keep the long and short vowels apart: दिदी (elder sister) and दिन (day) have the same i sound, and ु ू sound alike too. Spelling still distinguishes them, so they are learned word by word. In the same way श ष स are all usually said as a plain s, and व is said b or w: विकास (development) is bikās.

The halanta ् removes the built-in a. It joins consonants into conjuncts (स् + त = स्त in नमस्ते, ज् + ञ = ज्ञ, said gya as in ज्ञान) and, much more than in Hindi, it closes words: verb forms such as छन् (they are) and गर्छन् (they do) end with a visible halanta, while छ (is) keeps its final a. Your font draws the joined shapes; you only type the letters and the halanta.

The candrabindu ँ marks a vowel spoken through the nose and is one of the most frequent marks in Nepali: नयाँ (new), गाउँ (village), हुँ (I am), आउँछु (I will come).The anusvara ं, often called shirbindu, is a dot for a nasal sound before a consonant. In Sanskrit-derived words careful Nepali often writes the nasal letter itself instead of the dot, where Hindi usually prints the dot: अङ्क, घण्टा, पञ्चायत, सम्बन्ध. The visarga ः appears in loans such as दुःख (sorrow); the nukta ़ is rare, because Nepali writes English and Persian loans without it: फोन, जिन्दगी. Likewise ऑ ॉ for the o of English ball are used only in some spellings of English words, but everyday Nepali writes कलेज and अफिस.

Nepali punctuation, numbers and the rupee

Nepali ends a sentence with the danda ।: म नेपाली हुँ। (I am Nepali.) The double danda ॥ closes verses in poetry and prayers. Commas, question and exclamation marks and quotation marks are the same as in English. Do not use the vertical bar | for a danda: it looks close, but search, screen readers and line breaking treat it as a different character.

Nepali numbers are written with the Devanagari digits ० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९ in everyday life: on banknotes, newspapers, government forms, shop signs and calendars. Nepal's official calendar is the Bikram Sambat (विक्रम संवत्), about 56 years and 8 months ahead of the Western one, so in late 2026 Nepali dates read २०८३ साल.

Unicode has no sign of its own for the Nepalese rupee. In Nepali, prices are written with the abbreviation रु. before the amount (रु. ५००), in English with Rs. or the general rupee sign ₨. Nepali speakers in Sikkim and Darjeeling pay in Indian rupees, written ₹.

How to type Nepali: Unicode, Preeti and phone keyboards

Windows: Settings → Time & language → Language & region → add Nepali, which brings a Nepali keyboard; switch languages with Windows + Space. Many people in Nepal instead install the free Nepali Unicode Romanized or Nepali Unicode Traditional keyboards from Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya. Romanized puts letters on the Latin keys that sound like them (k → क, n → न), so it is the easiest way to type Nepali on a laptop with an English keyboard; Traditional follows the old typewriter layout that Preeti typists know. Either one types Nepali in MS Word, Gmail or any website.

Preeti is the legacy font that much of Nepal's office and print work used before Unicode. It draws Nepali shapes over ordinary Latin letters, so text typed in Preeti turns into a jumble of Latin letters and signs when it is pasted elsewhere or opened without the font. Unicode Nepali, the kind on this page, in fonts such as Kalimati, Mangal or Nirmala UI, pastes as Devanagari text where Unicode and its fonts are supported; Preeti-to-Unicode converters change old files over.

Mac: System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources → add a Devanagari layout; Devanagari – QWERTY places the letters on the keys by sound. Phones: on Android, add Nepali in Gboard or SwiftKey; on iPhone, add a keyboard under Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards, and if your version does not list Nepali, the Hindi Devanagari keyboard has every letter Nepali needs. WhatsApp, Viber and Facebook simply use the keyboard your phone has. For single characters, copy them from the grid above; in HTML the danda is ।, ॥ is ॥ and ₨ is ₨.

Where the Nepali language is spoken

Nepali is the official language of Nepal and its lingua franca: Nepal's 2021 census counted about 13 million people, some 45 % of the country, who speak it as their mother tongue, and most of the rest use it as a second language. It grew from the Khas language of western Nepal and was long called Khas kura, Gorkhali or Parbatiya before "Nepali" became its name.

In India, Nepali is one of the 22 languages of the constitution's Eighth Schedule (since 1992), an official language of Sikkim and of West Bengal's Darjeeling hills, and widely spoken in Assam and the Northeast. In Bhutan it is the language of the Lhotshampa of the south, and a long-established Nepali-speaking community, descended from Gurkha soldiers and workers, lives in Myanmar. Large communities of Nepali workers and students live in Malaysia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia.

Counts are estimates: Wikipedia gives about 19 million native speakers and 32 million in total, and CLDR estimates about 22 million users. Nepali is close to Hindi in grammar and shares much vocabulary through Sanskrit, but it is a separate language. See also the collections for Hindi, Maithili, Bhojpuri and the other Devanagari languages, and the country pages for Nepal 🇳🇵, India 🇮🇳 and Bhutan 🇧🇹; Nepal's flag is the only national flag in the world that is not a rectangle.