Kaithi

Kaithī Kayathi, Kayasthi
Type	Abugida
Languages	Angika, Awadhi, Bhojpuri, Magahi, Maithili, Hindustani
Time period	c. 16th–mid 20th century
Parent systems	Brahmi Gupta Nāgarī Kaithī
Sister systems	Devanagari, Nandinagari, Sylheti Nagari, Gujarati
Direction	Left-to-right
ISO 15924	Kthi, 317
Unicode alias	Kaithi
Unicode range	U+11080–U+110CF

Kaithi, also called "Kayathi" or "Kayasthi", is a historical script used widely in parts of North India, primarily in the former Awadh and Bihar. It was used for writing legal, administrative, and private records.^[1] This script is similar to the Gujarati script, or Devanagari.

Etymology

Kaithi script derives its name from the word Kayastha, a social group of India that traditionally consists of administrators and accountants.^[2] The Kayastha community was closely associated with the princely courts and colonial governments of North India, and were employed by them to write and maintain records of revenue transactions, legal documents, and title deeds; general correspondence; and proceedings of the royal courts and related bodies.^[3] The script used by them acquired the name Kaithi.

History

A printed form of the Kaithi script, as of the mid-19th century

Documents in Kaithi are traceable to at least the 16th century. The script was widely used during the Mughal period. In the 1880s, during the British Raj, the script was recognized as the official script of the law courts of Bihar. Kaithi was the most widely used script of North India west of Bengal. In 1854, 77,368 school primers were in Kaithi script, as compared to 25,151 in Devanagari and 24,302 in Mahajani.^[4] Among the three scripts widely used in the Hindi Belt, Kaithi was widely perceived to be neutral, as it was used by both Hindus and Muslims alike for day-to-day correspondence, financial, and administrative activities, while Devanagari was used by Hindus and Persian script by Muslims for religious literature and education. This made Kaithi increasingly unfavorable to the more conservative and religiously inclined members of society who insisted on Devanagari-based and Persian-based transcription of Hindi dialects. As a result of their influence and due to the wide availability of Devanagari type as opposed to the incredibly large variability of Kaithi, Devanagari was promoted, particularly in the Northwest Provinces, which covers present day Uttar Pradesh.^[5] Kaithi was also nicknamed "Shikasta Nagari" due to its relationship with Devanagari being akin to the relationship between the widely used dot-less Shikasta Nastaliq of the time and the more formal and fully expressive printed Nastaliq scripts.

Consonants

All Kaithi consonants have an inherent a vowel:

Vowels

Kaithi vowels have independent (initial) and dependent (diacritic) forms:

Diacritics

Several diacritics are employed to change the meaning of letters:

Punctuation

Kaithi has several script-specific punctuation marks:

General punctuation is also used with Kaithi:

• + plus sign can be used to mark phrase boundaries
• ‐ hyphen and - hyphen-minus can be used for hyphenation
• ⸱ word separator middle dot can be used as a word boundary (as can a hyphen)

Digits

Kaithi uses stylistic variants of Devangari digits. It also uses common Indic number signs for franctions and unit marks.^[6]

Unicode

Kaithi script was added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009 with the release of version 5.2.

The Unicode block for Kaithi is U+11080–U+110CF:

References