Indic Scripts

Entities Indic Scripts

Indic scripts are a large family of writing systems used throughout South Asia and neighboring regions. Unicode provides separate character ranges for scripts such as Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam.

Most Indic characters do not have named HTML character references. They can be entered directly in a UTF-8 HTML document or represented with decimal or hexadecimal numeric character references. This page uses Devanagari to demonstrate the basic types of characters found in many Indic writing systems.

Common Indic Scripts

Unicode assigns separate character blocks to the major Indic scripts. The following examples show representative letters from several commonly used scripts.

Devanagari Vowels

Devanagari is used for Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit, and other languages. Independent vowel letters are used when a vowel occurs without a preceding consonant.

Devanagari Consonants

The Devanagari consonants represent the basic consonant sounds used to form words. Vowel signs can combine with these letters to modify their pronunciation.

Devanagari Signs & Marks

Devanagari uses dependent vowel signs and combining marks with consonants and other letters. Some marks may not display meaningfully by themselves because they are designed to combine with another character.

Devanagari Digits

Unicode includes a complete set of Devanagari digits from zero through nine.

Using Indic Characters in HTML

UTF-8 allows Indic text to be entered directly into an HTML document. Numeric character references can also be used to represent individual Unicode characters. Because Indic writing systems frequently combine multiple characters into a single displayed unit, browsers and fonts may shape several Unicode characters together.

<p lang="hi">&#2344;&#2350;&#2360;&#2381;&#2340;&#2375;</p>
<p lang="hi">&#x915;&#x93F;&#x924;&#x93E;&#x92C;</p>