Masaram Gondi

The Gondi language belongs to the Central Dravidian group and is spoken by about 2 million people in the South Indian states of Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Chhattisgarh. The language is usually written in the Devanagari or Telugu scripts, but, in 1928, Munshi Mangal Singh Masaram designed a script specifically for the Gondi language. An older script for writing Gondi, Gunjala Gondi, is being revived in some places. The Masaram Gondi script includes thirty-six consonant letters, ten vowel letters, and ten vowel signs. The script is an abugida; each consonant letter contains an inherent a vowel which can be changed using a vowel sign. The virama symbol typical of Indic abugidas is missing from the script. Rather, the inherent vowel is cancelled by removing the horizontal line which is attached to the right of every letter. Conjuncts are formed in this way with the exception of ksạ, jña, tra, which are written with special ligatures, and combinations with RA, which exhibits contextual variation.

Masaram Gondi employs script-specific digits from 0-9. There is no script-specific punctuation; Latin punctuation is used.