Kawi Letter Ba

On its own, the letter stands for a complete ba syllable.

Kawi is an abugida: each consonant letter carries a default vowel. For 𑼨, that vowel is a, so it represents a full syllable rather than a bare b. The earliest known Kawi inscription is on the Plumpungan stele, an inscribed stone in Central Java, dated c. 750 CE. That dates the writing tradition, not this letter’s exact outline.

Kawi grew from Brahmi, an early South Asian writing system, through Pallava, a script used in South India. It carried Old Javanese, Sanskrit, Old Malay, Old Balinese and Old Sundanese in public inscriptions, grants engraved on copper plates, and palm-leaf books on literature, religion and calendars across Java, Bali, Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula and the Philippines. Javanese and Balinese scripts descend from Kawi; in 21st-century revival use, it also appears in digital and social-media writing for modern Javanese or Indonesian.

How does Kawi ba work?

A vowel mark changes the built-in a; special signs can cancel or join it.

A dependent vowel sign changes the syllable’s vowel. The killer sign cancels the default vowel, while the conjoiner helps form a conjunct, a cluster of joined consonants.

The Unicode reference glyph draws on early inscriptions and later examples; Kawi shapes varied by period and region. If a font lacks Kawi coverage or its text-shaping engine mishandles clusters, the letter can appear as an empty square or its marks may shift. Before 2022, some digital Kawi examples used Javanese or Balinese code points; a glyph could look right while being encoded as another script.