WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Kannada
Kannada gives its name to the script and is the only language here that uses it, where the character count is not the key count: 42 distinct characters appear across 41 practice words. Kannada is typed on the Kannada InScript layout.
Telugu's sibling, slightly more angular and sharing an ancestor with it. An abugida of around 49 letters in which consonant clusters are written by tucking a subscript form beneath the letter above, so text stacks vertically as well as running across. It has an unbroken literary tradition going back well over a thousand years.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 42 distinct characters across 41 practice words
- Composition
- marks stack or join onto the letters they modify
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Kannada keyboard layout
- Kannada InScript
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 26 of the 42 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
- ನ12
- ು11
- ದ9
- ಿ9
- ರ8
- ಲ8
- ೆ8
- ತ7
- ಮ7
The longest practice word in this script is ಸ್ನೇಹಿತ in Kannada.
The one language written in Kannada
Other writing systems
- Khmer Holder of the record for the largest alphabet — around 74 characters between the consonants, dependent and independent vowels and diacritics.
- Lao Closely related to Thai and simpler, because Lao underwent a spelling reform that Thai did not: words are written broadly as they sound, where Thai keeps etymological spellings from Sanskrit and Pali.
- Malayalam One of the larger Indic character inventories, historically including several hundred ligature forms for consonant clusters.
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.