WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Gurmukhi
Punjabi is the only language here written in the Gurmukhi script. The longest word you will practise here is ਅਸਮਾਨ, and there is a layout map behind it. Punjabi is typed on the Punjabi InScript layout.
Standardised in the sixteenth century by Guru Angad and used for Sikh scripture and for Punjabi in India. Punjabi in Pakistan is written in Shahmukhi, an Arabic-derived script, so the two halves of one language share a grammar and almost no written text. Punjabi is also tonal, which is rare for an Indo-Aryan language, and Gurmukhi marks the tones through particular consonant letters rather than diacritics.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 41 distinct characters across 44 practice words
- Composition
- marks stack or join onto the letters they modify
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Gurmukhi keyboard layout
- Punjabi InScript
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 26 of the 41 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.
- ਾ18
- ਸ9
- ੱ8
- ਹ8
- ਰ7
- ਕ6
- ਦ6
- ਨ6
- ਲ6
- ਜ5
The longest practice word in this script is ਅਸਮਾਨ in Punjabi.
The one language written in Gurmukhi
Other writing systems
- 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.
- Kannada Telugu's sibling, slightly more angular and sharing an ancestor with it.
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.