11 Facts About Gurmukhi

Gurmukhi is an abugida developed from the Landa scripts, standardized and used by the second Sikh guru, Guru Angad .

Commonly regarded as a Sikh script, Gurmukhi is used in Punjab, India as the official script of the Punjabi language.

Gurmukhi script is generally believed to have roots in the Proto-Sinaitic alphabet by way of the Brahmi script, which developed further into the Northwestern group, the Central group and the Eastern group, as well as several prominent writing systems of Southeast Asia and Sinhala in Sri Lanka, in addition to scripts used historically in Central Asia for extinct languages like Saka and Tocharian.

Gurmukhi is derived from Sharada in the Northwestern group, of which it is the only major surviving member, with full modern currency.

Gurmukhi evolved in cultural and historical circumstances notably different from other regional scripts, for the purpose of recording scriptures of Sikhism, a far less Sanskritized cultural tradition than others of the subcontinent.

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Sikh gurus adopted Proto-Gurmukhi to write the Guru Granth Sahib, the religious scriptures of the Sikhs.

In contrast to Landa, the use of vowel diacritics was made obligatory in Gurmukhi for increased accuracy and precision, due to the difficulties involved in deciphering words without vowel signs.

Gurmukhi alphabet contains thirty-five base letters, traditionally arranged in seven rows of five letters each.

Gurmukhi is similar to Brahmi scripts in that all consonants are followed by an inherent schwa sound.

Gurmukhi has its own set of digits, which function exactly as in other versions of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system.

Gurmukhi script was added to the Unicode Standard in October 1991 with the release of version 1.