Sylheti Alphabet (Syloti Nagri)

Sylheti, which its speakers call Silôṭi (ꠍꠤꠟꠐꠤ), is the language of the Sylhet region. Today most people write it in Bangla letters, but it has a script of its own, Syloti Nagri or Sylheti Nagri (ꠍꠤꠟꠐꠤ ꠘꠣꠉꠞꠤ), a member of the Brahmic family of scripts of South Asia. Its letters hang from a top line like Bangla and Devanagari, yet they are fewer and simpler, and many have shapes of their own.

Nagri was a people's script. It was used above all by Muslims of Sylhet for puthi, long books in verse on religion, saints, history and love, which were read aloud at home and at gatherings. Printing presses in Sylhet and Kolkata turned out Nagri books from the late 19th century, and the best-loved of them, Halat-un-Nabi, a verse life of the Prophet, was reprinted again and again. After the middle of the 20th century Bangla schooling replaced it, and in recent decades it has been taught and printed again by enthusiasts in Bangladesh and in the British Sylheti community.

Unicode added Syloti Nagri in version 4.1 (2005), in the block U+A800–U+A82F. All 45 characters of the block are on this page, so every letter here is real text that pastes into messages, documents and social media.

Sylheti Nagri letters: 32 letters, inherent o, vowel signs and hasanta

The alphabet has 32 letters: five vowel letters, ꠀ ꠁ ꠃ ꠄ ꠅ (a, i, u, e, o), and 27 consonants from ꠇ ko to ꠢ ho. Each consonant carries the vowel o by itself, which is why Unicode names them ko, kho, go: ꠇ alone reads kô. The consonants follow the order shared by the scripts of India, by where the sound is made in the mouth, then ꠞ ro, ꠟ lo, the flapped ꠠ rro (the sound of Bangla ড়), ꠡ so and ꠢ ho.

Nagri is built for Sylheti speech: one letter each for i and u, a single s-letter ꠡ, the anusvara ꠋ for ng, and almost no stacked conjunct letters. That is why it was praised as a script that could be learned at home in a short time.

A vowel sign typed after a consonant replaces its o: ꠇꠣ ka, ꠇꠤ ki, ꠇꠥ ku, ꠇꠦ ke, ꠇꠧ ko. The anusvara ꠋ adds the ng sound that has no letter of its own, and the dvisvara ꠂ marks a vowel glide. The hasanta ꠆ suppresses the inherent vowel and can form conjuncts between consonants, although clusters are often written without it. ꠬ is an alternate hasanta for word-final consonants, not clusters; it is rare and is used when ꠆ would overhang the following space.

Sylheti numbers and punctuation

Separate Syloti Nagri digit forms are attested in older and modern publications, but they are not encoded in Unicode. Unicode text commonly uses Bengali digits ০ ১ ২ ৩ ৪ ৫ ৬ ৭ ৮ ৯, encoded in the Bengali block, so 2026 is written ২০২৬ and 10 is ১০.

The Devanagari single danda । is used as a full stop in modern Sylheti prose, and the double danda ॥ is common in Sylheti poetry. The four poetry marks ꠨ ꠩ ꠪ ꠫ are punctuation used in combinations to indicate metrical units; some authors still use them, though they are not essential in modern writing.

How to type Syloti Nagri: keyboard, font and copy and paste

There are no Alt codes or Mac Option shortcuts for Syloti Nagri. To type it, install a Syloti Nagri keyboard app on your phone or a Nagri layout on your computer, use an online Sylheti Nagri keyboard, or copy the letters from this page. Type in reading order: the consonant first, then its vowel sign or the hasanta.

To see the letters you need a font that covers the script, such as the free Noto Sans Syloti Nagri from Google. Without one, Nagri text shows as empty boxes, but the text itself is fine and appears as soon as a font is installed. In HTML you can write a letter as a numeric reference, for example ꠇ for ꠇ.

Where the Sylheti language is spoken

Sylheti is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language, close to Bangla but different enough in sounds, words and grammar that speakers of standard Bangla often struggle to follow it, and many linguists count it as a language of its own. CLDR estimates about 8.4 million speakers in Bangladesh 🇧🇩, where Sylhet Division in the northeast is its home.

Across the border in India 🇮🇳 Sylheti is the everyday language of the Barak Valley of Assam, around Silchar, and is spoken in parts of Tripura and Meghalaya. Far away, most British Bangladeshis 🇬🇧 trace their families to Sylhet, so Sylheti is heard daily in East London and in the curry houses of towns across Britain, and there are large Sylheti communities in the United States and the Gulf. For the Bangla letters most Sylheti speakers also write, see the Bangla collection; for the region's own scripts see Assamese and Chakma, and the Bangladesh page for the country's emoji.