The Gondi Alphabet

Gondi ^[1] (ISO 639-3: gon) is a South-Central Dravidian language spoken by the Gondi (Gond) people across central India — including Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Odisha, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh.

The CIIL documents Gondi as one of India's largest tribal languages by speaker numbers, belonging to the Gondi-Kui subgroup of South-Central Dravidian.

Related languages include Muria, Koya, Kuwi, Konda, and Abujmaria — all members of the South-Central Dravidian branch of the Dravidian family.

The Masaram Gondi script ^[2] is an indigenous script for the Gondi language, attributed to Munshi Mangal Singh Masaram, who developed or systematised it in the early 20th century.

The script is an abugida (alphasyllabary) — each consonant character carries an inherent "a" vowel, and vowel signs or a virama mark are used to indicate other vowels or suppress the inherent vowel.

The Masaram Gondi script was encoded in Unicode 10.0 (2017) in the range U+11D00–U+11D5F. A second Gondi script, the Gunjala Gondi script, was encoded in Unicode 11.0 (2018) in the range U+11D60–U+11DAF.

Yes — the Unicode Standard ^[2] includes two Unicode blocks for Gondi scripts. The Masaram Gondi block (U+11D00–U+11D5F) was added in Unicode 10.0 (2017) and encodes the script shown on this page. The Gunjala Gondi block (U+11D60–U+11DAF) was added in Unicode 11.0 (2018).

Both scripts are abugidas used to write the Gondi language. To display Masaram Gondi script correctly, your device needs a compatible font such as Noto Sans Masaram Gondi — the recommended open-source font for this script.

This page uses the Noto Sans Masaram Gondi font, which is loaded automatically to ensure the characters display correctly on all devices.

Gondi ^[1] is spoken across a wide geographic area of central India, primarily in Chhattisgarh (Bastar, Dantewada, Narayanpur), Madhya Pradesh (Mandla, Dindori, Balaghat), Maharashtra (Gadchiroli, Chandrapur), Odisha (Kalahandi), and northern Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.

The Gondi-speaking area spans the forested tribal belt of the Satpura-Vindhya-Deccan plateau region — one of the largest contiguous tribal areas in India.

The CIIL documents significant dialectal variation across this wide distribution, with different Gondi dialects showing varying degrees of mutual intelligibility.

Gondi ^[1] belongs to the South-Central Dravidian branch, which also includes Telugu. Gondi and Telugu are thus genetic relatives within the Dravidian family — both descended from Proto-South-Central-Dravidian — but they are not mutually intelligible.

Telugu developed as a major literary language with over two millennia of written tradition, while Gondi remained primarily oral until the development of the Masaram Gondi and Gunjala Gondi scripts.

The CIIL classifies Telugu and Gondi in the same South-Central Dravidian subgroup based on shared features of vocabulary, morphology, and phonology from their common ancestor.

The Gondi people ^[1] (also called Gond) are one of the largest Scheduled Tribe communities in India, with populations across the tribal belt of central India.

Historically, the Gondi people established the Gondwana kingdom in the 14th–18th centuries — a confederation of principalities that governed much of central India before Mughal and Maratha expansion. The name "Gondwana" — which geologists adopted for the ancient supercontinent — derives from the Gond people's homeland.

The Gondi cultural heritage includes distinct traditions, Gond art, oral literature, and religious practices that are expressed through the Gondi language.

Gondi ^[1] is spoken by a significant number of people across central India, making it less immediately endangered than smaller tribal languages. However, it faces challenges from Hindi (Chhattisgarh/Madhya Pradesh), Marathi (Maharashtra), Odia (Odisha), and Telugu (Telangana/Andhra Pradesh).

The diverse dialectal variation of Gondi also means speakers of different dialects may shift to Hindi or other regional languages as a common lingua franca.

The development of the Masaram Gondi and Gunjala Gondi Unicode scripts is seen as an important step toward the written standardisation and preservation of the Gondi language.

Two Gondi scripts ^[2] have been encoded in Unicode. The Masaram Gondi script (U+11D00–U+11D5F, Unicode 10.0, 2017) is attributed to Munshi Mangal Singh Masaram. The Gunjala Gondi script (U+11D60–U+11DAF, Unicode 11.0, 2018) is a distinct script associated with the Gunjala village in Maharashtra.

Both scripts are abugidas for the Gondi language, but they have different letterforms and are used by different Gondi communities. The CIIL ^[1] documents both scripts as part of Gondi writing system development.

This page shows the Masaram Gondi script (U+11D00–U+11D5F), which was the first Gondi script to be Unicode-encoded.