Overview

Indian fonts


In the countries India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka of the Indian subcontinent there still survive – despite the colonialisation of the past – numerous different writing systems (more than 100, although some of these are at acute risk of becoming extinct) and the corresponding languages. In addition to Arabic script, which is used in Pakistan and some of the Indian states and territories with a high proportion of Muslim inhabitants (such as Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Kashmir) to write texts in the official language, Urdu, the most prominent of the other scripts employed are descendants of the Old Indian Brahmi script.

Among the 11 most important writing systems and the main languages for which they are employed are:

 Writing system  Main languages  Total speakers
 Devanagari  Hindi, Marathi  > 600 million
 Bengali script  Bengali  > 200 million
 Gurmukhī script  Punjabi  > 100 million
 Arabic script
(extended Persian alphabet)
 Urdu, Sindhi, Kashmiri  > 80 million
 Telugu script  Telugu  74 million
 Tamil script  Tamil  65 million
 Gujarati script  Gujarati, Kutchi  > 60 million
 Kannada script  Kannada  > 38 million
 Malayalam script  Malayalam  33 million
 Oriya script  Oriya  33 million
 Sinhala script  Sinhala  > 15 million



Indian states and territories and neighbouring countries and their regional scripts