Assamese alphabet

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The Assamese alphabet (Assamese: অসমীয়া বৰ্ণমালা, romanized: Ôxômiya Bôrnômala) is a version of the Bengali script that was adopted by the Bengal-based printing press for Assamese in the 19th century and replaced the Assamese script by the 20th century. This alphabet is also used for Sanskrit as well as other languages such as Bodo (now Devanagari), Khasi (now Roman), Mising (now Roman), Jaintia (now Roman) etc. The replacement by this Bengali-based alphabet caused the traditional Assamese script to be mostly illegible to those trained in the current Bengali script, making historical Assamese literature illegible to the vast majority of Assamese speakers. The traditional Assamese script is a continuous development from the 5th-century Umachal/Nagajari-Khanikargaon rock inscriptions written in an eastern variety of the Gupta script, adopting significant traits from the Siddhaṃ script in the 7th century. By the 17th century three styles of the traditional Assamese script could be identified...

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