Telugu Language - Writing System

Writing System

The famous Muslim historian and scholar of 10th century, Al-Biruni referred to Telugu language and script as "Andhri".

Telugu script is written from left to right and consists of sequences of simple and/or complex characters. The script is syllabic in nature – the basic units of writing are syllables. Since the number of possible syllables is very large, syllables are composed of more basic units such as vowels (“achchu” or “swaram”) and consonants (“hallu” or “vyanjanam”). Consonants in consonant clusters take shapes that are very different from the shapes they take elsewhere. Consonants are presumed to be pure consonants, that is, without any vowel sound in them. However, it is traditional to write and read consonants with an implied 'a' vowel sound. When consonants combine with other vowel signs, the vowel part is indicated orthographically using signs known as vowel “maatras”. The shapes of vowel “maatras” are also very different from the shapes of the corresponding vowels.

The overall pattern consists of sixty symbols, of which 16 are vowels, three vowel modifiers, and forty-one consonants. Spaces are used between words as word separators.

The sentence ends with either a single bar | (“purna viramam”) or a double bar || (“deergha viramam”). Traditionally, in handwriting, Telugu words were not separated by spaces. Modern punctuation (commas, semicolon, etc.) were introduced with the advent of print.

There is a set of symbols for numerals, though Arabic numbers are typically used.

Telugu is assigned Unicode codepoints: 0C00-0C7F (3072–3199).