How to type Bangla in Roman letters

Type these and you can type Bangla. The rest of this page is detail, for the day you need it.

Every one of these gives you real Bangla. That is what makes them awkward: nothing has gone wrong, you have just been handed a different letter from the one you meant.

Length is a capital, never a repeat: aa is আআ. And lowercase boi is বই where uppercase bOI is বৈ.

The shape a vowel takes at the start of a word, or standing alone.

The capital carries meaning in i/I, u/U and o/O. In a and e it does not; the uppercase is accepted because people type it that way.

The same vowels, attached. ক is the carrier here; every consonant behaves the same way.

A consonant on its own already carries the inherent অ. You type something to get rid of that vowel, not to get it.

Grouped the way Bangla groups them, so the pattern shows: unaspirated, aspirated, and the nasal at the end of each row of five.

Lowercase is dental or palatal, uppercase retroflex. An h aspirates, so k is ক and kh is খ.

Two letters do double duty: y and w stand alone here and turn into phola marks after a consonant, which is its own section below.

f stands in for ph, v for bh, S for sh. People type them that way, so they are in the scheme.

Phones capitalize the first letter of a sentence whether or not you asked, so a capital with no meaning of its own falls back to its lowercase reading. Eleven carry a meaning instead, and two of those catch people: R is ড় where r is র, and C is one of the ways to write ch.

Between two consonants, o keeps them apart: kok is কক where kk is ক্ক. Before a cluster it is the inherent vowel of the letter in front of it.

For a visible ও there instead, use the capital: kOk is কোক.

Type the consonants in order and the hasant is implied. Three in a row need nothing special either: ndr is ন্দ্র.

An o ends a cluster the same way it keeps two consonants apart, so ndor is ন্দর.

The two phola marks are y and w, and they act as phola only when a consonant comes before them. z and b stay the whole letters য and ব, so you can write য্য as zy.

The ya-phola composes onto a whole cluster, so loanwords work: plYan is প্ল্যান. Four bases refuse it: r, R, Rh and Ng.

A doubled r before a consonant writes the reph, the hook that sits above the letter. rm is রম, two letters; rrm is র্ম, one.

It will sit over a whole cluster too, so rrkSh gives র্ক্ষ.

ng is the anusvar ং, and it is the common case. Ng is the consonant ঙ. ngg and nggh are shorthand for the clusters ঙ্গ and ঙ্ঘ.

Where that shorthand is not what you want, a capital M forces a literal anusvar. And ঞ্জ, if that is what you came for, is nj.

Written জ plus ঞ and pronounced like neither, so there are three ways in and all three land in the same place. Spell it out as jNG, shorten it to jn, or type the sound most people actually make, gg.

^ writes the chandrabindu and goes after the vowel it nasalizes. qq is a second route to the same mark.

: writes the bisarga. The colon is claimed, so there is no way to type an ASCII colon through the engine.

Latin digits become Bangla numerals, and the dollar key writes the taka sign.

The full stop gets it right without being told: between digits it stays a decimal point, at the end of a sentence it becomes the dari. Numerals take no vowel marks and join no conjuncts.

q and x have no Bangla sound of their own, and neither is left as Latin. Each takes the convention Bangla writing already settled on: q is ক and x is the ক্স cluster.

Standing alone, w is the ওয় glide, and aY is the অ্যা most borrowed words need.

rZy is a narrow signal with one job. It writes the ZWNJ-separated র‌্য used in spellings like র‌্যাব, which is a different shape from the true conjunct র্য. Z rewrites nothing else, and it is the one letter the engine hands back as Latin.

Two commas write a bare hasant, for when you want the mark visible or want a boundary the automatic rules would not choose.

A hasant kills the inherent vowel, so it needs one to kill. After an explicit kar there is nothing left to remove and the signal is dropped.

You will rarely type this one by hand, because ts already composes it. Reach for the explicit form at the end of a word, where nothing follows to trigger it: t and two backticks.

The real engine, running in your browser. It follows the rules on this page and nothing else: no corrections, no next-word suggestions, and nothing you type goes anywhere.

The engine’s own playground, which adds corrections and next-word suggestions on top, is at obadh.unmukto.org/playground. If something here gives you a letter you did not expect, what makes a report reproducible is on the contribute page.

The box changes a whole line or none of it. One character it does not accept, and the line comes back exactly as you typed it. The usual cause is punctuation a phone or a word processor put in for you: the em dash, the en dash, curly quotation marks, the single-character ellipsis. Plain ASCII punctuation is fine.

You will not meet this while typing on the keyboard, which commits one word at a time and takes punctuation separately. It shows up in the box above, in the playground, and in anything scripted around the command-line tool.

Most people reading this learned to type Bangla on Avro Phonetic, and most of what you know transfers unchanged, including x, q, v, f, S, gg, ng and NG, the $ taka sign, the ^ chandrabindu, the , hasant, and a full stop at the end of a sentence. Consonants that meet still bind, o still writes the inherent vowel, and a doubled r still writes the reph. Avro settled most of it, and what Avro settled is now simply how Bangla is typed.

Four things are spelled differently. An alias is added to the scheme only where there is a phonetic, orthographic or ergonomic reason for it, so the list is short.

Long vowels are capitals, not doubled letters. Avro Phonetic maps ee to ঈ and oo to উ. Obadh reads a doubled vowel as two vowels, so ঈ is I and ঊ is U. This is the habit worth changing first: it is the one that bites inside the first sentence.

The diphthongs are capitals too. OI is ঐ and OU is ঔ. Lowercase oi is two vowels in a row, so boi is বই and bOI is বৈ.

On its own, w is ওয়. That is what loanwords want: waTar is ওয়াটার. Avro Phonetic maps a bare w to ও. After a consonant the two agree, and kw is ক্ব in both.

খণ্ড ত has its own signal. Inside a word a t before an s composes it. Where it ends a word, type t and two backticks: hoThat`` is হঠাৎ.

Avro behavior here was read from OmicronLab’s pyAvroPhonetic in August 2026. Avro Phonetic has no published specification, so this describes that rule set and not every keyboard that has adopted the scheme.

Obadh is not Avro-compatible and does not claim to be. If a word comes out in a shape you did not expect, this page is the reference, and the whole scheme is short enough to read in one sitting.