The Origin
The story of a script born from the Tiprasa people — and the mission to give Kokborok, a writing system of its own.
The Language
Kokborok is one of the oldest living languages of Northeast India, spoken by over a million Tiprasa people across Tripura, Assam, Mizoram, and the Tiprasa diaspora worldwide. It belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family and carries centuries of oral tradition — songs, folklore, ritual speech, and poetry passed mouth to ear across generations.
Yet for most of its history, Kokborok has lacked a writing system genuinely built around its own sounds and structure. Existing scripts — Bengali and Roman — were adapted for Kokborok but were not designed for it. They approximate, but they cannot fully capture the phonological richness of the language: its aspirates, its affricates, its tonal distinctions.
The Need
Scripts are not neutral tools. They carry cultural weight — they shape how a language is taught, remembered, and perceived. A script designed from outside a community reflects the priorities of outsiders. A script born from within reflects the community's own understanding of its language.
Yapiri was created to give Kokborok a writing system that is phonologically precise — every sound has a dedicated character. It is visually distinct — no glyph borrowed from any other script. And it is culturally grounded — designed by a member of the Tiprasa community, for the Tiprasa community.
The name yapiri — rendered as "footprints" in English — captures this philosophy. The Kokborok word literally means "footsteps": not just the marks left behind, but the act of moving forward. Writing is both.
The Creator
Yapiri was designed by Animesh Debbarma, a member of the Tiprasa community of Tripura, India. With a background in typography, calligraphic design systems, and constructed scripts — Animesh Debbarma brought both linguistic understanding and design precision to the project.
Every glyph was drawn from first principles: no shapes borrowed from existing scripts, no compromises on phonological coverage. The result is a segmental alphabet that covers all Kokborok phonemes including aspirates, affricates, and a tonal diacritic — with custom numerals and a full punctuation system.
The long-term vision includes Unicode submission via the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley, making Yapiri a permanent part of the international standard for digital text.
The Journey
Study of existing Kokborok writing systems — Bengali script, Roman script, Aima, and Kókmari — and their phonological gaps. Decision to design from first principles.
Each character drawn in Inkscape using a calligraphic system built on consistent stroke logic. Consonants, vowels, numerals, diacritic, and punctuation all designed to form a coherent visual family.
Full font production in FontForge: PUA codepoint mapping (U+F1CA0–U+F1CFF, Plane 15), OpenType GPOS anchors for diacritics, kerning tables, and vertical metrics. Font released in TTF and WOFF2 formats.
yapiriscript.com launched with interactive keyboard tool, full glyph showcase, and downloadable font. Google Search Console indexed. HTTPS enforced via GitHub Pages.
The script migrated from the BMP Private Use Area (U+E000–U+E02D) to the Plane 15 Supplementary PUA (U+F1CA0–U+F1CFF) to deconflict with existing PUA conventions, and the inventory was refined to 45 characters.
Yapiri Script was added to the Under-ConScript Unicode Registry with the Plane 15 block U+F1CA0–U+F1CFF, giving the script a stable public Private Use Area allocation and resolving earlier codepoint conflicts.
Yapiri Script was listed on Omniglot as a constructed script for Kokborok, bringing the script into one of the world’s best-known online references for writing systems and languages.
Six-phase roadmap toward formal Unicode encoding via the Script Encoding Initiative at UC Berkeley — making Yapiri a permanent part of the international digital text standard.