Type in Nepali

1. Nepalese languages

Once in Nepal, communities remained completely isolated by steep valleys, high mountains and by thick forest, leading to the evolution of many distinct languages, given as 92 in the 2001 census but now put by ethnologue at 124 distinct living languages. This increase in number seems mostly related to distinguishing dialects within larger groups previously thought to belong to a single linguistic community. Ethnologue’s linguistic map for Nepal, reproduced in Figure 1, shows the hot spot of languages scattered across the country.

If we take Trosterud’s suggestion that at least those languages with more than 16,000 speakers should be written, we find that we should expect all languages down to and including Dhimal should be written; this is 28 languages, just under one third of the languages, in line with the proportion in the population of world languages as a whole. Table 3, lists these 28 languages plus two others, with relevant characteristics extracted from Ethnologue. Note that 8 of them have much larger populations across the border in India, with one of these, Maithili, the second largest language of Nepal. This leaves 20 Nepalese languages, only one of which, Nepali, is used in written form in all walks of life and can be considered fully literate; however most of them have at least some limited use in writing.

2. Nepalese writing

However only four of these purely Nepalese languages have any significant tradition of being written:

• Nepali, historically known as Khas, Parbatiya and Gorkhali, with 11,053,255 speakers in 2001, has been written in Devanagari, the script used across north India and in particular for Hindi, for around 300 years.
• Newari, with 825,458 speakers in 2001, is known as Nepal Bhasa within the linguistic community, and has been written for over a thousand years in a number of scripts.
• Limbu with 333,633 speakers in 2001, has a traditional script Sirijanga which was probably derived from Lepcha writing. It is claimed to have been invented in the 9th century and then revived in the 17th century by Te-ongsi Sirijonga, and then revived again in 1925 when it was formally named “Sirijanga”.
• Lepcha (also known as Rong), with 2,826 speakers in Nepal but 48,000 in Sikkim in India, is written in a script evolved from the Tibetan script, which tradition claims was devised in the 17th or 18th centuries (Wikipedia 2012b).

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.