Modi Letter A

It is Modi’s independent vowel letter A. In Modi, consonants normally carry an inherent “a” sound; 𑘀 writes that vowel on its own. For example, 𑘎 (Modi Letter Ka) already includes the vowel.

Modi is a flowing script used mainly to write Marathi, a language of western and central India. It descends from the Nagari family of scripts, which also includes Devanagari, and was adapted for continuous handwriting. Stories credit its arrival to Hemadri Pandit or its creation to Balaji Avaji, but neither account is settled. Records place Modi in administrative use in the 16th century; its oldest surviving document dates to the early 17th century.

Maratha governments used it officially from the 17th century. Modi also appeared in letters, land records, school primers, newspapers and diaries. Printing began in the early 19th century, after Charles Wilkins made metal type for it. In the 1950s, official use ended and Devanagari, known as Balbodh in Marathi, was promoted as the standard script for Marathi.

Why does 𑘀 show as a box?

A box usually means the font lacks Modi support. Unicode stores this independent vowel as one character, while Modi fonts shape many other letter combinations contextually. A font without Modi coverage can show a replacement box even though the text remains valid Unicode.

Before Modi was added to Unicode in 2014, some digital material used legacy font mappings or circulated as images and PDFs instead of portable text. Changing the font cannot turn those older codes or page images into this Unicode character.