The Gujarati script, which like all Nagari writing systems is strictly speaking an abugida rather than an alphabet, is used to write the Gujarati language and the Kutchi language. It resembles Devanagari script without the line. A few letters are different, such as e (when not preceded by a consonant), l, and j. Also its numerical digits are different from their Devanagari counterparts.

With a few additional characters, added for this purpose, Gujarati can also be used to write Sanskrit.

Gujarati Alphabets, special symbols and numbers

The Gujarati alphabet utilizes overall 94 distinct legitimate and recognised shapes, which mainly includes 34 vyanjana (ornamented sounds – consonants), 2 compound characters that are treated as consonants (not lexically though), and 14 svara (pure sounds – vowels).

The alphabet is ordered by logically grouping the vowels and the consonants based on their pronunciations. The vowels (svara) consists of three pure sounds – a, i, and u. In the alphabet, the vowels follow the following order:

• Pure sounds with their lengthened versions: a, aa ; i, ii ; u, uu
• Combined versions: ae, ai, o, ou
• Nasal and Aspirated: .m, .h

The consonants (vyanjana), on the other hand, are grouped in eight categories; seven of which are named by considering the usage and position of the tongue during their pronunciation. These categories are (in order): velar, palatal, retroflex, dental, labial, sonorant and fricatives. Further, each group (with a couple of exceptions) has five consonants in which the group starts with the softer sounding consonants, then the aspirated forms appear, and the group ends with the nasal sounding consonant. The alphabetic arrangement thus made aids in easy recitation and is retained in the memory for longer duration.

Sentence construction

In accordance with all the other Indic scripts, Gujarati is also written from left to right, and is not case-sensitive. The smallest unit or syllable is called akshara. Akshara is formed by combining minimum of one svara (vowel) with none or one vyanjana (consonant). A combination of one or more akshara forms a shabda (word). One or more words when put together with appropriate grammatical considerations form a vaakya (sentence). However, unlike Sanskrit where a sentence may be written literally without any spaces in between, Gujarati words are separated by a blank space. A space indicates the end of a word, but is not used as a form of explicit punctuation. The Gujarati writing system can be categorized under abugida, where each consonant has an inherent vowel (a), which can be modified by the application of other vowels.

Resemblance with Devanagari

Owing to their origin from Brahmi, both Devanagari (used for Indic languages like Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi and alike) and Gujarati scripts share the same shape for majority of their alphabets. The apparent difference can be attributed to the missing horizontal top bar from the Gujarati letter-forms compared to Devanagari. That apart, a reader who is able to read Devanagari script, should be able to interpret Gujarati script fairly easily. Consider the following example where a Sanskrit sloka is written in both the scripts:

Alphabet table

Alphabet and script related reference and resources

• TDIL: Ministry of Communication & Information Technology, India
• University of Pennsylvania: Gujarati language and literature resource page

Gujarati in Unicode

The Unicode range for Gujarati script is from U+0A80 to U+0AFF. The ISCII Code-page identifier for Gujarati script is 57010.

The table below shows the glyphs that are implemented in Unicode standard 4.0.0. Gray boxes indicate the code-points that are undefined/unused.