WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Gujarati
Gujarati gives its name to the script and is the only language here that uses it, where the character count is not the key count: 40 distinct characters appear across 43 practice words. Gujarati is typed on the Gujarati InScript layout.
Derived from Devanagari and immediately distinguishable from it by what is missing: the horizontal line along the top of the letters. That omission has a practical origin in commercial handwriting, where not lifting the pen to draw a headline saved time. It is otherwise a close relative, and it is typed on the same InScript layout.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 40 distinct characters across 43 practice words
- Composition
- marks stack or join onto the letters they modify
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Gujarati keyboard layout
- Gujarati InScript
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 24 of the 40 characters its practice words use
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in the language below, most frequent first. These are the keys worth finding without looking.
- ા13
- ન10
- ં9
- ર9
- ક8
- મ7
- ુ7
- ી6
- ે6
- સ5
The longest practice word in this script is દિવસ in Gujarati.
The one language written in Gujarati
Other writing systems
- Gurmukhi Standardised in the sixteenth century by Guru Angad and used for Sikh scripture and for Punjabi in India.
- Hangul Designed from scratch in the fifteenth century, and it shows: letters are shaped to reflect how they are pronounced, and they assemble into square syllable blocks as you type.
- Hebrew Written right to left, with no vowels in ordinary text — readers supply them from context, and the dots that mark them are used only in dictionaries, poetry and scripture.
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.