WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Telugu
Telugu gives its name to the script and is the only language here that uses it, where the character count is not the key count: 37 distinct characters appear across 41 practice words. Telugu is typed on the Telugu InScript layout.
A rounded script closely related to Kannada; the two were a single script until roughly the fifteenth century and remain similar enough that readers of one can often puzzle out the other. Telugu is strongly vowel-final — most words end in a vowel — which gives it a very regular consonant-vowel alternation and, historically, the nickname the Italian of the East.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 37 distinct characters across 41 practice words
- Composition
- marks stack or join onto the letters they modify
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Telugu keyboard layout
- Telugu InScript
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 25 of the 37 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.
- ి16
- ్15
- ు14
- ద13
- న13
- ం10
- ా10
- మ8
- ర7
- క6
The longest practice word in this script is స్నేహితుడు in Telugu.
The one language written in Telugu
Other writing systems
- Thai Forty-four consonants, around 28 vowel forms and four tone marks, written without spaces between words — spaces mark the ends of clauses instead, which makes working out where one word ends a job for the reader and a well-known hard problem for software.
- Latin The most widely used alphabet in the world, and the one your keyboard is built around.
- Cyrillic Developed in the ninth century and now used across Eastern Europe and much of Central Asia.
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.