Newari Alphabet & Nepal Lipi

Newari, which its speakers call Nepal Bhasa (नेपाल भाषा) or Newaḥ Bhāy (नेवाः भाय्), is the language of the Newars of the Kathmandu Valley. Today it is printed and typed almost entirely in Devanagari, the script of Nepali and Hindi: the vowels अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ऋ ए ऐ ओ औ with their signs (नु नू ने नो), and the consonants in the old phonetic grid from क ख ग घ ङ to य र ल व श ष स ह. The full Sanskrit set is there because Newari has borrowed heavily from Sanskrit for well over a thousand years.

Newari belongs to the Tibeto-Burman branch of the Sino-Tibetan family, a distant cousin of Tibetan and Burmese; Nepali and Hindi are Indo-Aryan languages. So the same letters spell very different words: Nepali says धन्यवाद for "thank you", Newari says सुभाय्.

Two signs give a Newari text its look. The visarga ः, which in Sanskrit is a breathy h, is written after a vowel to mark it long: नेवाः (newāḥ, "Newar"), खः (khaḥ, "is"), नेवाः is said with a long final a, not with an h. And the virama ् (halant) sits on many final consonants to show that no vowel follows: सुभाय् "thank you", भाय् "language". Newari also has breathy n, m, l and r sounds, written in Devanagari as a consonant joined to ह: न्हू "new", म्ह, ल्ह.

Nepal Lipi, Ranjana and the Newa script in Unicode

Before Devanagari took over, Newari had scripts of its own, a family called Nepal Lipi or Nepal Akhala. The everyday member is Prachalit ("current") Nepal script, used for manuscripts, inscriptions and documents in the valley for centuries. Unicode added it in version 9.0 (2016) under the name Newa, in the block U+11400–U+1147F, and fonts such as Noto Sans Newa display it; without one you see empty boxes.

Nepal Lipi follows a similar consonant order to Devanagari, so the tables line up for shared letters: 𑐎 is क, 𑐣 is न, 𑐩 is म. Unicode also gives it single letters for Newari's breathy sounds, which Devanagari has to spell with ह: 𑐓 ngha, 𑐙 nyha, 𑐤 nha, 𑐪 mha, 𑐭 rha, 𑐯 lha. It has its own danda 𑑋 and double danda 𑑌, a comma 𑑍, the digits 𑑐 to 𑑙, an Om 𑑉 and the siddhi 𑑊, an auspicious sign that opens a text.

Ranjana is the ornate, square-cut sister, the Newar calligraphy of Buddhist texts, temple inscriptions and prayer wheels; in Tibet it is known as Lantsa and is used to write Sanskrit titles and mantras. Ranjana is not yet encoded in Unicode, so it cannot be copied as plain text: it is set with special fonts or drawn by hand. Newar organisations promote both scripts again, and you see them on signboards, wedding cards and festival posters across the valley.

How to type Newari and Nepal Lipi

Newari in Devanagari uses the same keyboards as Nepali and Hindi. On Windows, add Nepali or Hindi under Settings → Time & language → Language & region and pick a Devanagari keyboard; switch with Win+Space. On a Mac, add Devanagari, Devanagari – QWERTY or Hindi – Transliteration under System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources. On a phone, add Nepali or Hindi to Gboard or SwiftKey. The two signs Newari needs most, ः and ्, are on the standard Devanagari layouts such as InScript and Windows Nepali; copy them here if yours hides them.

Few keyboards offer Nepal Lipi. The simple ways are to copy letters from the tables on this page or to use a Devanagari-to-Nepal-Lipi converter, which transliterates the text into Nepal Lipi; the result is real Unicode text that anyone with a Newa font can read. In HTML any letter can be written by its code: 𑐎 is 𑐎, 𑑅 is the visarga 𑑅 and ः is the Devanagari visarga ः.

Where Newari is spoken

CLDR estimates about 1 million speakers of Newari, all of them counted in Nepal. Its heartland is the Kathmandu Valley, whose three old royal cities have Newari names of their own: Yẽ (यें) for Kathmandu, Yala (यल) for Patan (Lalitpur) and Khwopa (ख्वप) for Bhaktapur. Newar trading towns are scattered across the hills, and the dialect of Dolakha in the east is so different that it is hard to follow for valley speakers. Many younger Newars now speak Nepali at home, and Newari is one of the languages campaigners work hardest to keep in daily use.

For the same Devanagari letters see the Nepali, Hindi and Maithili collections; for other languages of Nepal and the Himalaya the Western Tamang and Tibetan ones; and for the flag 🇳🇵, the rupee ₨ and more emoji the Nepal collection.

Newar culture in emoji

Newars greet each other with ज्वजलपा (jwajalapā) and folded hands 🙏, and thank with सुभाय्. The Newar year runs on its own calendar, Nepal Sambat, counted from 879 CE; its new year falls on Mha Puja (म्हपूजा), the "worship of the self" during Tihar, when every member of the family sits in front of a mandala beside lit oil lamps 🪔, and greetings say न्हूदँया भिन्तुना, "happy new year".

Food carries festivals: 🥟 stands for yomari, the steamed rice-flour dumpling filled with molasses and sesame that gives Yomari Punhi, the December full moon, its name, and 🍚 for baji, the beaten rice at the heart of samay baji, the ritual festive platter. 🎭 is the masked Lakhey dancer of Yẽnyā (Indra Jatra) and 🪘 the dhimay drums that often lead jatra processions. 🛕 ☸️ 🕉️ stand for the valley's pagoda temples and stupas, where Hindu and Buddhist Newars have worshipped side by side for centuries.