Assamese Alphabet

Assamese Alphabet

The Assamese script (অসমীয়া লিপি Ôxômiya Lipi) is a variant of the Eastern Nagari alphabet also used for Bengali and Bishnupriya Manipuri. The Assamese/Bengali script belongs to the Brahmic family of scripts and is thought to have a continuous history of development from Nagari script, a precursor of Devanagari. However, there are linguists who have a different interpretation about the evolution of the Assamese Script who claim that it evolved from the earlier stage of the Nagari Script, the Gupta Script with significant traits from the Siddham Script. Their claims are supported by the peculiarities of the shapes of the characters found in the Nogajori-Khonikor Gaon stone inscriptions of the 5th century A.D. where the letters are distinctly different from Nagari and have close resemblance with the Gupta Script. By the 17th century three styles of Assamese script could be identified (baminiya, kaitheli and garhgaya) which gave way to the standard script which followed the typeset script. The present standard is identical to the Bengali script except for three letters.

Buranjis were written during Ahom dynasties in Assamese language using Assamese script. The earliest evidence of Assamese script is found in the Charyapada, the Buddhist songs. They are supposed to have been composed within a time-frame of four hundred years from 8th century AD to 12th century AD. In the 14th century Madhava Kandali used Assamese script to compose the famous Kotha Ramayana which is the first translation of Ramayana in a regional Indian language after Valmiki Ramayana in Sanskrit. Later, Srimanta Sankardeva used it in the 15th and 16th centuries to compose his oeuvre in Assamese and Brajavali the language of the Bhakti poems (Borgeets) and Dramas (Ankiya naat).

Ahom king Chakradwaj Singha, (1663-1670 AD) was the first ruler who started issuing Assamese coins for his kingdom (see figure for a sample coin). Similar script with minor differences are used to write Maithili, Bengali, Manipuri and Sylheti language.