Sirmauri Script & Letters

Sirmauri (सिरमौरी) is written today in Devanagari, the script of Hindi, Nepali and Marathi: left to right, with the letters hanging from a line along the top (the shirorekha). There is no separate Sirmauri alphabet in Unicode, and every letter on this page is the same character a Hindi text uses. The vowels are अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ऋ ए ऐ ओ औ; each except inherent अ has a dependent sign (matra) for use after a consonant (सा सि सी सु सू सृ से सै सो सौ), and the consonants follow the old phonetic grid, from क ख ग घ ङ through प फ ब भ म to य र ल व श ष स ह.

Every consonant carries a built-in a, so स alone is sa. The virama ् removes it, and two consonants then join into a conjunct: श + ् + र = श्र, as in श्री रेणुका जी. Alphabet charts add क्ष त्र ज्ञ at the end, but they are such joined pairs, not separate letters, and you type them as two letters with a virama between.

Sirmauri's historical script is distinct from Takri but related to it. It was commonly used in Sirmaur until the mid-20th century, including for official records and formal education, and it remains in cultural and religious use. Devanagari replaced it for official and educational purposes during the 20th century. The Sirmauri script itself has not been encoded in Unicode. Takri has had its own Unicode block since 2012 (its letters such as 𑚀 and 𑚊 have pages on this site).

Special letters in Sirmauri writing: ड़ ढ़ and the nasal signs

ड़ and ढ़ are flaps: the tongue curls back and strikes once, like a quick r. Sirmaur's own names need them: चूड़धार, the district's highest peak, and बूढ़ी दिवाली, its late Diwali. The dot under them is the nukta ़. Unicode has two ways to write each: a single character (U+095C ड़, U+095D ढ़) or ड / ढ followed by the nukta. They look the same, and Unicode normalization decomposes both forms to the same two-part sequence; searches match them only when the search system normalizes text.

Nasal vowels are marked with the candrabindu ँ (moon and dot), and the anusvara ं (a dot alone) can stand for a homorganic nasal before a stop; in पांवटा, the town of Paonta Sahib, it instead marks nasalization of the preceding vowel before व. As in Hindi, writers often use the plain dot in place of the candrabindu when a matra already sits above the line. The visarga ः appears only in Sanskrit words such as दुःख "sorrow".

Sirmauri has no official standard spelling: it has no official status, so people write it by ear using the conventions they learned for Hindi, and the same word can be spelled in more than one way in song lyrics and posts. The letters stay the same; only their choice varies.

How to type Sirmauri on a keyboard and phone

There is no separate Sirmauri keyboard: people type Sirmauri with Hindi (Devanagari) keyboards. On Windows, add Hindi under Settings → Time & language → Language & region and choose the Devanagari INSCRIPT layout or the Hindi phonetic keyboard, where you type in Latin letters and pick the Devanagari word; switch with Win+Space. On a Mac, add Devanagari, Devanagari – QWERTY or Hindi – Transliteration under System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources.

On a phone, add Hindi to Gboard or SwiftKey. Its transliteration mode lets you type budhi diwali and pick बूढ़ी दिवाली from the suggestions, which is how many people write Sirmauri Nati captions, statuses and WhatsApp messages. The suggestions are built for Hindi, so Sirmauri words sometimes need a letter fixed by hand; copy ड़ ढ़ ँ । or the digits ० to ९ from this page when the keyboard does not offer them.

In HTML any letter can be written by its code: स is स, ड़ is ड़, ँ is the candrabindu ँ and । is the danda ।.

Where the Sirmauri language is spoken

CLDR estimates about 490,000 speakers of Sirmauri, all of them in India. Its home is Sirmaur district in the south-east of Himachal Pradesh, with its headquarters at Nahan, bordering Uttarakhand and Haryana. India's census does not list Sirmauri separately but counts it under Hindi, and almost every speaker also knows Hindi.

The Giri river cuts the district in two, and so does the language: Dharthi, the speech of the lower country around Nahan, and Giripari, from pār "across": the speech across the Giri, in the higher hills around Shillai, Sangrah and Haripurdhar. Sirmauri belongs to the Western Pahari languages; it is closely related to Mahasu Pahari, spoken around Shimla to the north, and to Jaunsari across the Tons in Uttarakhand, and it shares its letters with the Hindi, Kangri, Dogri, Garhwali and Kumaoni collections. For the flag and emoji of the whole country see the India collection.

Sirmaur emoji: Budhi Diwali, Bishu, Renuka Ji and Churdhar

Budhi Diwali (बूढ़ी दिवाली, "old Diwali") is the festival people most associate with Sirmaur: the Giripar villages celebrate it about a month after the rest of India, with bonfires and pinewood torches, all-night singing and Nati dancing, so it gets 🔥🪔🪘. The usual explanation is that news of Rama's return to Ayodhya reached the hills late. Parts of Kullu and Shimla and the Jaunsar region of Uttarakhand keep a Budhi Diwali too.

In spring the Bishu fairs bring out Thoda (ठोडा), an archery game played as a dance by two teams said to descend from the Pandavas and Kauravas, who shoot at each other's legs: 🏹. In November the Shri Renuka Ji fair gathers people at Renuka lake 🏞️, the largest natural lake in Himachal Pradesh, where the god Parashurama is carried in a palanquin to meet his mother Renuka 🛕🙏.

Churdhar (चूड़धार), Sirmaur's highest peak, is a summer pilgrimage to the shrine of Shirgul Maharaj, through deodar forest 🏔️🌲. Paonta Sahib on the Yamuna, where Guru Gobind Singh lived for several years, is one of the great Sikh gurdwaras: 🪯. Sirmauri Nati songs dance to the dhol and nagara 🪘🎶💃🕺, the loiya 🧥 is the long woollen coat of the Sirmauri traditional dress, and the district is one of Himachal's main ginger growers 🫚.