The Bhili Alphabet

Bhili (ISO 639-3: bhb) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken primarily by the Bhil tribal people of western and central India. It is spoken across four states: Rajasthan (especially the Mewar, Vagad, and Dungarpur regions), Gujarat (Panchmahals, Dahod), Madhya Pradesh (Jhabua, Alirajpur, Dhar, Barwani), and Maharashtra (Nandurbar, Dhule). Bhili has approximately 12–14 million speakers, making it one of the largest tribal/Adivasi languages of India by speaker count.

Bhili is classified within the Central Indo-Aryan group and is linguistically close to Rajasthani dialects. It is sometimes treated as a dialect cluster — encompassing multiple related varieties including Bhilali, Bareli, Bhilodi, and Wagdi — rather than a single unified language. Despite this complexity, the name "Bhili" (ISO 639-3: bhb) is used as the primary designation for the language in linguistic databases. Bhili is not included in India's Eighth Schedule of recognised languages, though there is a movement for its recognition.

Bhili is written in the Devanagari script (Unicode Block U+0900–U+097F) — the same script used for Standard Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, and Sanskrit. Devanagari is a Brahmic abugida, written left to right, in which each consonant letter carries an inherent /a/ vowel modified by diacritical signs called matras.

The Devanagari alphabet used for Bhili includes 33 standard consonants, 11 independent vowels, a set of vowel diacritics (matras), the halant/virama for forming consonant clusters, and native Devanagari digits (०–९). Because Bhili shares the script with the dominant language Hindi (widely used across the Bhil homeland states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Maharashtra), literacy in Devanagari serves both Bhili and Hindi communication. In informal contexts, some Bhili speakers also write using the Latin alphabet.

The Bhil people (भील) are one of India's largest Scheduled Tribe (Adivasi) communities, with a population estimated at over 12–14 million. They primarily inhabit the hilly and forested regions of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra, with smaller communities in other states. Historically, the Bhil were known as skilled archers, hunters, and forest-dwellers — their archery proficiency is celebrated in the legend of Eklavya from the Mahabharata.

Bhil culture is characterised by distinctive art forms, including Pithora paintings — vibrant ritual paintings created on walls of homes to invoke the deity Pithora for blessings. The Bhil also have rich oral traditions, festival dances (Ghoomar in some regions), and their own religious practices blending animism with elements of Hinduism. The Bhil homeland straddles some of India's most biodiverse forest regions, and the Bhil economy has traditionally been based on forest produce, agriculture, and pastoral activities.

Bhili is an Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Central Indo-Aryan group, and it is linguistically closest to Rajasthani dialects — particularly Mewari and Vagadi. Bhili and Rajasthani share features such as similar phonological inventories, grammatical structures, and vocabulary. Bhili is also in close contact with Gujarati in the Gujarat Bhil homeland, resulting in significant Gujarati loanwords and phonological influence.

Bhili is not a dialect of Standard Hindi (Khariboli) — it belongs to a different sub-branch of Indo-Aryan and has distinct grammatical and lexical features. However, because Hindi is the official language of both Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, and a co-official language in Gujarat, Bhili speakers commonly use Hindi for formal communication and literacy, while Bhili is maintained in the home and community. Bhili also preserves some archaic Indo-Aryan vocabulary not found in Standard Hindi or Rajasthani.

The ISO 639-3 code for Bhili is bhb. The language is catalogued in Glottolog under the identifier "bhil1238". Bhili has no ISO 639-1 two-letter code, as only major world languages are assigned two-letter codes under ISO 639-1.

In linguistic databases, Bhili (bhb) is listed as a separate language from the related varieties of Bhilali, Bareli, Bhilodi, and Wagdi, each of which has its own ISO 639-3 code. The broader "Bhili group" forms a dialect cluster within Central Indo-Aryan, reflecting the linguistic diversity of the Bhil people across their wide geographic distribution in western and central India.