Type in Nepali

1. Nepali Language

Once in Nepal, communities remained completely isolated due to steep valleys, high mountains, and thick forests, leading to the evolution of many distinct languages. The 2001 census reported 92 languages, but Ethnologue now lists 124 distinct living languages. This increase in number is largely due to the reclassification of dialects within larger groups that were previously thought to belong to a single linguistic community. Ethnologue’s linguistic map of Nepal, reproduced in Figure 1, shows the hotspots of languages scattered across the country.

If we consider Trosterud’s suggestion that languages with more than 16,000 speakers should be written, we would expect all languages down to and including Dhimal to be written. This amounts to 28 languages, just under one-third of the total, which aligns with the proportion of written languages globally.

2. Nepali Writing

Four of the following Nepalese languages have a significant tradition of written use

• Nepali (historically known as Khas, Parbatiya, and Gorkhali) had 21 million speakers in 2021. It has been written in the Devanagari script, the same script used across northern India, particularly for Hindi, for approximately 300 years.
• Newari, spoken by 880,000 people in 2021 and known as Nepal Bhasa within its linguistic community, has been written for over a thousand years using various scripts.
• Limbu, with 410,000 speakers in 2021, uses a traditional script called Sirijanga, which likely originated from Lepcha writing. This script is believed to have been created in the 9th century, revived in the 17th century by Te-ongsi Sirijonga, and revived again in 1925 when it was formally named “Sirijanga.”
• Lepcha (also known as Rong), with 66,730 speakers in Nepal, Sikkim, and India, is written in a script derived from the Tibetan script. Tradition suggests this script was developed in the 17th or 18th centuries.

Ethnologue only reports limited literacy for Newari and Limbu, not surprising since these languages were suppressed by successive Nepalese governments from the late 18th century onwards until 1990. While the writing of Limbu and Lepcha was probably only ever used for special cultural and religious texts, Newar writing was used for a wide range of purposes until the overthrow of their regime by the Gorkhas in the mid 18th century.

Note that cross border languages, and particularly Maithili and Bhojpuri, also have their own mature literature and may be written in their own distinctive script; for Maithili the script is known as Mithilakshar or Tirhuta, for Bhojpuri it is Kaithi.

Indic writing including Devanagari and Bengali has been printed in movable type since around 1800, with the type evolving and being simplified over the centuries. When computers became used for writing and publishing, the encoding of Devanagari and other Indic scripts was undertaken in India, leading to the Indian Script Code for Information Interchange – ISCII. Work had been proposed to include Devanagari within the then established standard for computers, ISO 8859, as part 12, but this work was abandoned expecting to adopt ISCII’s codes into ISO 8859. However ISO 8859 was in turn superseded by Unicode, which included a code block for Devanagari and other major Indic scripts from the start, with the code blocks adapted from a 1988 version of ISCII. One significant difference between ISCII and Unicode was that in ISCII all the scripts of India had been unified within a single table, with the different scripts selected by appropriate font, whereas in Unicode these were dis-unified into separate code blocks.

The encoding of Limbu was added to the Unicode Standard in April 2003 with the release of version 4.0. Limbu was introduced to the standardisation process by McGowan and Everson in 1999, and a proposal was written jointly by Boyd Michaelovsky and Michael Everson in 2002. Michaelovsky is a linguist who has done considerable field research among the Limbu in Nepal learning about their writing in context, appealing in the proposal to both examples of writing and to the phonology of the spoken language. Even so there have been some discussions since then about missing characters, and in 2011 Pandey proposed two additional composite characters, though there is a case for introducing the virama instead.