Script - Wancho

Wancho is a script used for writing the Wancho language, spoken by the Wancho people in the eastern Himalayan region of Arunachal Pradesh, India. It is an alphabetic writing system, consisting of 41 letters, including 10 vowels and 31 consonants, with diacritics for tone and nasalization. The script was developed in the early 2000s by Banwang Losu, a community leader, to preserve and promote the endangered language, which had previously been written using variations of the Latin or Devanagari scripts. Its characters are designed to be phonetically accurate and culturally relevant, with distinct shapes that differ from neighboring scripts. The script’s encoding enables digital communication, literacy, and the documentation of oral traditions, thus supporting the linguistic and cultural identity of the Wancho community.