Saurashtra Language

     Saurashtra is an Indo-European language, related to Gujarati and spoken by about 310,000 people in southern India. The Telugu, Tamil, Devanagari, and Saurashtra scripts have been used to publish books in Saurashtra since the end of the 19th century. At present, Saurashtra is most often written in the Tamil script, augmented with the use of superscript digits and a colon to indicate sounds not available in the Tamil script.  The Saurashtra script is of the Brahmic type. Early Saurashtra text made use of conjuncts, which can be handled with the usual Brahmic shaping rules. The modernized script, developed in the 1880s, has undergone some simplification.

The Unicode encoding of the Saurashtra script supports both older and newer conventions for writing Saurashtra text. Glyph Placement. The vowel signs (matras) in Saurashtra follow the  consonant to which they are applied. The long and short -i vowels, however, are typographically joined to the top right corner of their consonant. Vowel signs are also applied to U+A8B4 saurashtra consonant sign haaru. Digits: The Saurashtra script has its own set of digits. These are separately encoded in the Saurashtra block.Punctuation:  Western-style punctuation, such as comma, full stop, and the question mark are used in modern Saurashtra text. U+A8CE saurashtra danda is used as a text delimiter in traditional prose. U+A8CE saurashtra danda and U+A8CF saurashtra double danda are used in poetic text. Saurashtra Consonant Sign Haaru. The character U+A8B4 saurashtra consonant sign haaru, transliterated as “H”, is unique to Saurashtra, and does not have an equivalent in the Devanagari, Tamil, or Telugu scripts. It functions in some regards like the Tamil 330 South Asian Scripts-II.