Masaram Gondi

The Masaram Gondi script was created by Munshi Mangal Singh Masaram in the late nineteenth century to write the Gondi language, a Dravidian language spoken by the Gondi people of central India across Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana. The Gondi people had previously used various regional scripts, including Telugu and Devanagari, none of which adequately represented the phonology of their language. Masaram designed the script so that each phoneme of Gondi would have its own unique character, making it a more suitable representation of the language than borrowed scripts. The script was added to Unicode in version 10.0 (2017) and is written left to right. It is an abugida: consonants carry an inherent /a/ vowel that is suppressed by a virama diacritic and other vowels are indicated with diacritical marks attached to the consonant.