WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Bengali
2 languages here are written in Bengali. The longest word you will practise here is সমাধান, and there is a layout map behind every one of them. They take 2 variants of one layout between them — Assamese InScript and Bengali InScript — so the keys stay where you learn them and only the extra characters move.
Closely related to Devanagari and just as much an abugida, with a distinctive headline running along the top of most letters. It is unusually ligature-heavy: consonant clusters merge into single glyphs whose shapes are not always obviously derived from their parts, which makes reading back what you typed a skill of its own. Assamese uses the same script with two letters of its own.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 41 distinct characters across 68 practice words
- Composition
- marks stack or join onto the letters they modify
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Bengali keyboard layouts
- Assamese InScript, Bengali InScript
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 58% to 65% of what each language's words use
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in both languages below, most frequent first. These are the keys worth finding without looking.
- া30
- ন16
- স13
- ক12
- র12
- ু11
- ত10
- ্10
- ব9
- দ7
The longest practice word in this script is সমাধান in Bengali, and the widest bank to practise from is Bengali at 46 words.
The 2 languages written in Bengali
Other writing systems
- Ethiopic An abugida — and the one the word is named after, from the Ge'ez letters a-bu-gi-da.
- Han Logographic: each character represents a word or a meaningful part of one, and there are tens of thousands.
- Armenian Created around 405 AD and unrelated to any neighbouring script, with 39 letters written left to right.
There is a written guide for this script: InScript: how one layout covers eight Indian scripts. India's standard keyboard is not one layout but a family. The same key gives the matching letter in Devanagari, Bengali, Telugu and five more.
Every script this site teaches, with the languages written in each, is on the languages hub. If your computer does not produce these characters yet, that is a setting rather than a missing keyboard — adding a keyboard layout covers it for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. The rest of the written guides cover what is the same whichever script you are in: posture, the home row, and why speed follows accuracy rather than the other way round.