Santali, also known as Santal or Santhali, is the most widely-spoken language of the Munda subfamily of the Austroasiatic languages, related to Ho and Mundari, spoken mainly in the Indian states of Assam, Bihar, Jharkhand, Mizoram, Odisha, Tripura and West Bengal by Santals. It is a recognised regional language of India per the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. It is spoken by around 7.6 million people in India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal, making it the third most-spoken Austroasiatic language after Vietnamese and Khmer.
Santali books in Mayurbhanj Book Fair
Devanagari is an Indic script used in the northern Indian subcontinent. Also simply called Nāgari, it is a left-to-right abugida, based on the ancient Brāhmi script. It is one of the official scripts of the Republic of India and Nepal. It was developed and in regular use by the 7th century CE and achieved its modern form by 1000 CE. The Devanāgari script, composed of 48 primary characters, including 14 vowels and 34 consonants, is the fourth most widely adopted writing system in the world, being used for over 120 languages.
A few palm leaves from the Buddhist Sanskrit text Shisyalekha composed in the 5th century by Candragomin. Shisyalekha was written in Devanāgarī script by a Nepalese scribe in 1084 CE. The manuscript is in the Cambridge University library.
The Jñānēśvarī is a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, dated to 1290 CE. It is in written in Marathi using the Devanāgarī script.
A mid-10th century Sanskrit land grant for a college, written in Devanāgarī, and discovered on a stone buried in north Karnataka. Parts of the inscription are written in Canarese script.
Devanāgarī INSCRIPT bilingual keyboard layout