Gujarati script
Brahmic abugida script used to write the Gujarati language
The Gujarati script (ગુજરાતી લિપિ Gujarātī lipi) is an abugida for the Gujarati language, Kutchi language, and various other languages. It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic. It is a variant of the Devanagari script differentiated by the loss of the Shirorekhā, the characteristic horizontal line running above the letters and by a number of modifications to some characters.
Gujarati numerical digits are also different from their Devanagari counterparts.
Origin
The Gujarati script (ગુજરાતી લિપિ) was adapted from the Nagari script to write the Gujarati language. The Gujarati language and script developed in three distinct phases — 10th to 15th century, 15th to 17th century and 17th to 19th century. The first phase is marked by use of Prakrit, Apabramsa and its variants such as Paisaci, Shauraseni, Magadhi and Maharashtri. In second phase, Old Gujarati script was in wide use. The earliest known document in the Old Gujarati script is a handwritten manuscript Adi Parva dating from 1591 to 1592, and the script first appeared in print in a 1797 advertisement. The third phase is the use of script developed for ease and fast writing.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q733944. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1591, 1592 and 1797.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gujarati script” 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.