This Gondi (Gunjala) Keyman keyboard has been designed for use on physical keyboards (laptops, etc.) as well as hand-held touch devices (such as smart phones, tablets, etc.) for the Gondi language spoken in the districts of Yavatmal, Chandrapur, Gadchiroli and Aheri of Maharashtra State in central India.

Touch Keyboard layout

Default Layer

All Gondi words can be typed on the default layer (without the need for invoking Shift).

Shift Layer

The Shift layer contains some additional (aspirated) characters which are not required for Gondi, but could be useful to type borrowed Hindi and Marathi language words.

Numeric Layer

The Numeric 123 layer contains the full range of Gunjala digits, Arabic digits (accessible through a long-press) and other important symbols and lesser used punctuation characters.

Although the vowel matra forms are not displayed, the keyboard will automatically put the diacritic form on a preceding consonant.

Finally, holding (long press) the . (full-stop or period) key provides other punctuation marks.

Physical Keyboard Layout

The physical keyboard (for use on desktop computers) is rather different to the touch layout, and follows the standard WinScript keyboard layout followed by NLCI’s range of keyboards. With a few exceptions, these work more-or-less phonetically.

Default layer:

With Shift depressed:

It is sometimes necessary in the Gondi language to use a halant part way through a word, especially on a suffix boundary. In order to do this, one must press the x key twice (to add the Zero-Width Non Joiner U+200C).

If the Gunjala digits are required, these can be typed by pressing the ` key (back-tick or tilde ~ key which is to the left of digit 1) prior to the digit.