Sadri (Nagpuri) Language Letters

Sadri (सादरी, also सदरी) is the same language that is called Nagpuri (नागपुरी), and its ISO code is sck. The name Sadri is linked to the Sadan, the Indo-Aryan-speaking communities of Chota Nagpur whose mother tongue it is; Nagpuri comes from Chota Nagpur itself, not from the city of Nagpur in Maharashtra, whose Marathi is an unrelated language. Today Sadri is written in Devanagari, the script of Hindi, with the same letters. No special font is needed: any Devanagari font, including the ones built into Windows, macOS, Android and iOS, writes it correctly.

Older Nagpuri writing used Kaithi as well as Devanagari; Bengali and Roman letters are also used, and Sadri is not used as a school medium. A good deal of what people write online in Sadri, such as Nagpuri song lyrics and shayari, is typed in Latin letters instead (Johar, Nagpuri gana), and in the tea-garden region it has also been written in the Bengali script. This page collects the Devanagari letters.

Sadri alphabet in Devanagari: vowels, matras and consonants

Devanagari is an abugida: every consonant carries a built-in short a, so क is ka. Other vowels are added as signs called matras, written before, after, above or below the consonant: का कि की कु कू के कै को कौ. The full vowel letters अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ए ऐ ओ औ stand at the start of a word or after another vowel. The candrabindu ँ marks a nasal vowel, as in गाँव (village), the anusvara ं writes a nasal before a consonant, as in झारखंड, and the virama ् removes the built-in vowel so that letters join into conjuncts.

The dotted letters Sadri needs most are the flaps ड़ and ढ़: ड and ढ with the nukta dot ़ below, the ṛ sound of words such as अखड़ा (dance ground) and पहाड़ (hill). Leaving the dot off writes a different sound, so careful writers keep it. ऋ, ष and the visarga ः appear in words and names taken from Hindi and Sanskrit, and in everyday speech श and ष are usually said like स; ऑ ॉ write the English o of loanwords such as डॉक्टर.

Sentences end with the danda ।, the verses of a song with the double danda ॥, and numbers can be written with Devanagari digits ० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९ or with 0–9.

Nagpuri songs, jhumair and festivals

Many searches for Sadri are for its songs: Nagpuri gana, Sadri song lyrics and the latest video releases, from village dance songs to film tracks and church hymns sung in Sadri. The folk dance that goes with them is jhumair (झुमइर), danced in linked lines to the mandar drum 🪘 on the akhra (अखड़ा), the village dance ground; Nagpuri folk singers such as Mukund Nayak and Madhu Mansuri Hasmukh have been awarded the Padma Shri. People greet each other with जोहार (Johar), the greeting shared by the peoples of Jharkhand, often with folded hands 🙏.

The festivals are those of the whole plateau. In spring, when the sal trees 🌳 blossom 🌼, comes Sarhul (सरहुल). In the rainy season comes Karam (करम): a branch of the Karam tree 🌿 is planted in the akhra and danced around through the night 💃🕺. After the harvest 🌾, Sohrai (सोहराई) honours the cattle 🐂 with lamps 🪔 and painted house walls. The word for a festival in Sadri is परब (parab), so people post करम परब and सरहुल परब.

How to type Sadri on a keyboard and phone

Gboard offers Sadri as a keyboard language; the Hindi keyboard also has every letter Sadri needs. On Windows, add Hindi under Settings → Time & language → Language & region and choose a layout: Hindi Traditional is the InScript standard with one key per letter, and the phonetic layout lets you type ka to get क. Switch with Windows + Space. On a Mac, add Hindi under System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources and pick Devanagari, Devanagari – QWERTY or Hindi – Transliteration. To get ड़, type ड and then the nukta ़.

On a phone, add the Hindi keyboard in Gboard or in iPhone settings. Both offer transliteration: type johar in Latin letters and pick जोहार from the suggestions. Transliteration often drops the nukta or the candrabindu, so check words like पहाड़ and गाँव, or copy the letters from this page. In HTML, ड़ is ड़, ढ़ is ढ़, ँ is the candrabindu ँ and । is the danda ।. Do not use the vertical bar | for a danda: it looks close, but search and screen readers treat it as a different character.

Sadri language is spoken in which state?

Sadri is above all the language of Jharkhand, around Ranchi, Gumla, Lohardaga, Simdega and Latehar, and it reaches into the Jashpur and Surguja districts of Chhattisgarh, Sundargarh in Odisha and the neighbouring parts of Bihar and West Bengal. Jharkhand lists Nagpuri among its additional official languages. When labourers from Chota Nagpur were taken to the tea gardens of Assam and North Bengal in the nineteenth century, Sadri became the common language of the gardens, and "Sadri language in Assam" is a common question; communities descended from them also live in Bangladesh. CLDR estimates about 2.5 million speakers in India, and census counts vary because many speakers record their language as Hindi.

Sadri is an Indo-Aryan language of the Bihari group, close to Bhojpuri, Magahi and Maithili and more distantly to Hindi. Across Chota Nagpur it is also the language people of different mother tongues use with each other: Kurukh, a Dravidian language, and the Munda languages Santali, Mundari and Ho are spoken beside it, and many of their speakers use Sadri every day. Chhattisgarhi, Odia, Bangla and Assamese border it, and each of these languages has its own collection. For the flag 🇮🇳, the rupee and India's emoji, see the India page.