Kirat Rai
Brahmic abugida script invented for the Bantawa language spread across Nepal and Sikkim
Kirat Rai (also called Khambu Rai, Rai Barṇamālā and Kirat Khambu Rai) is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the Sumhung Lipi of 1920s, used to write the Bantawa language in the Indian state of Sikkim. Kirat Rai is composed of 31 primary characters, including seven vowels (and seven related vowel diacritics), one of which (/a/) is inherent in all consonants, 31 consonants, a virama to cancel the inherent vowel, and a vowel carrier to be used in combination with the vowel diacritics for writing word-initial vowels.
History
Khambu Rai is part of the Brahmic family of scripts from India, Nepal, Tibet and Southeast Asia. Smriti Rai mentions that the Khambu Rai people, speakers of the Bantawa language used to write with the Khambu Rai script developed by Late Kripasalyan Rai in 1981-1982 from the Devnagari script. The Khambu-Rai language (Bantawa language) is taught in schools up to the primary level ever since the Khambu-Rai language was recognized as one of the official languages of Sikkim in 1997. The origin of the Kirat Rai script goes as far back as the 1920s, when the Sumhung Lipi script was created by Tika Ram Rai for writing a religious book called Sumhung. In 1981-82 Kripasalyan Rai of Gyalshing district reintroduced and promoted Sumhung Lipi script as "Kripasalyan Lipi" through his book Rāī Akṣarko Barṇamālā.
Unicode
Kirat Rai was added to the Unicode Standard in September, 2024 with the release of version 16.0. As of that date, there was a single Unicode font, put out by SIL.
The Unicode block for Kirat Rai is U+16D40–U+16D7F:
External links
Kanchenjunga, a font for Kirat Rai.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Kirat Rai” is brahmic abugida script invented for the Bantawa language spread across Nepal and Sikkim. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Kirat, Brahmic and abugida, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q123173834. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1981, 1982, 1997 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kirat Rai” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.