The fastest way to start writing in Yapiri is the web keyboard at yapiriscript.com/try. There is nothing to install — it runs directly in your browser, on desktop, tablet, and phone. Open the page, click or tap the keys, and your text appears instantly in the Yapiri script.

The keyboard is organised into clearly labelled sections, each covering a different part of the Yapiri character set — vowels, consonants, diacritic, numerals, and punctuation. This guide walks through every section in order, so you know exactly what each key does and how the tool is meant to be used.

Tip: keep the keyboard open in a browser tab while you work. Compose the text you need, then use the Copy Text button to paste it into other applications — Word, LibreOffice, notepads.

The Output Area

At the top of the keyboard page, before any keys, is the output area — the place where your typed text appears. It has two lines.

The top line displays your text in the Yapiri script at large size, using the Yapiri font that the website loads automatically. This is your main compose area.

The bottom line shows the romanization — a phonetic transcription of everything you have typed, written in standard Latin letters. It updates live as you type and is the easiest way to check that you pressed the right keys.

󱲩󱲤󱲩󱲪󱲤󱲷󱲤󱲩 Yapiri output — what you see as you type kokborok — the romanization shown on the line below
Note The Yapiri font is loaded automatically by the website — so the glyphs always display correctly here, even if you have never installed the font on your device. You only need the font installed when you paste Yapiri text into other applications.

The Control Buttons

Just below the output area is a row of control buttons. These manage your text rather than adding characters to it.

Vowels — Start Here

The first key section holds Kokborok's six vowels. They are the best place to begin, because they appear in virtually every word.

󱲠a 󱲡e 󱲢i 󱲣u 󱲤o 󱲥ə

The sixth vowel — ə (schwa) — is the one most specific to Kokborok. It is a neutral, central vowel that appears frequently mid-word, often written as w in Roman Kokborok (as in twi, water). On the keyboard it is mapped to the x key. It never starts a word; if a word begins with a /w/ sound, use the consonant W key instead.

Consonants — Mind the Aspiration

The consonants are grouped into rows by phonetic type. The one thing to understand before anything else is aspiration — the puff of air that separates pairs like p and ph, or t and th. In Kokborok this difference changes meaning, so each aspirated consonant has its own dedicated key in Yapiri.

The Stops row covers the plain voiceless stops (p, t, k), their aspirated counterparts (ph, th, kh), and the voiced stops (b, d, g). The Affricates & Nasals row covers ch, j, m, n, the palatal nasal n′, and ng. The Fricatives & Approximants row covers s, r, l, y, w, and h.

Note th is not the English "th". In Yapiri, th is simply the aspirated version of /t/ — a /t/ with a breath behind it. The same logic applies to ph (aspirated p) and kh (aspirated k). None of these are the English digraph sounds.

The Extended & Secondary Characters row — marked with a gold border — contains two secondary keys: v and z. These cover sounds that do not exist in native Kokborok but appear in loanwords and scientific names. When writing native Kokborok vocabulary, you will never need them — the 21 native consonants cover everyday speech entirely.

Diacritic — High Tone Mark

Yapiri v2.0 has one combining diacritic — the High Tone Mark. It attaches to the character you just typed to indicate a high tone on that syllable.

󱳑high tone
Note The High Tone Mark is Yapiri's only combining diacritic in v2.0. The earlier reduplication mark has been removed from the standard inventory — reduplication is handled orthographically.

Numerals and Punctuation

The Numerals section contains Yapiri's ten digits — 0 through 9 — a complete numeral system that replaces the standard Arabic digits when writing in the script. On a physical keyboard, the number keys type them directly.

󱳀 󱳁 󱳂 󱳃 󱳄 󱳅 󱳆 󱳇 󱳈 󱳉 Yapiri numerals 0 through 9

The Punctuation section holds five marks — comma, full stop, exclamation mark, quotation mark, and question mark — plus a dedicated Space key and a Delete key for convenience. These punctuation keys are native Yapiri glyphs rather than standard ASCII characters, so they display correctly wherever the Yapiri font is installed.

The Unicode Inspector

Below the keyboard sits the Unicode Inspector — a developer tool that shows the codepoint of every character in your output as you type. Yapiri v2.0 is encoded within the UCSUR Plane 15 block spanning U+F1CA0 to U+F1CFF — a registered allocation confirmed by the Under-ConScript Unicode Registry. The inspector displays the exact codepoint beside each glyph.

If you are just composing and copying text, you can safely ignore this section. But it is genuinely useful for verifying that the correct characters were entered — especially when working with diacritics or the secondary loanword keys — and indispensable for developers and font engineers handling Yapiri text programmatically.

Using the Keyboard on Mobile

The virtual keyboard works fully on mobile browsers. Open yapiriscript.com/try in Chrome, Safari, or any browser on your phone or tablet, and tap the keys as you would on any on-screen keyboard. The output area scrolls if your text grows long.

Tip On Android, tap Copy Text and then long-press in any text field to paste. On iPhone, tap Copy Text, then tap and hold the cursor in your notes or messaging app and choose Paste. The glyphs may appear as empty boxes in apps that lack the Yapiri font — but the characters are correctly encoded and will render perfectly in any app that has the font installed.

From the Web Keyboard to System-Wide Typing

The web keyboard is perfect for quick composing and for trying the script with no commitment. When you want to type Yapiri anywhere on your device — directly in Word, LibreOffice, your notes, or a chat app — install the Keyman keyboard package instead. It adds native Yapiri input on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android, and is available free from the Download page. The web keyboard and the Keyman package share the same layout and the same Unicode mappings, so anything you learn here carries straight over.

What to Type First

If you are new to Yapiri, a good first exercise is your own name transliterated into Kokborok sounds, or a short, familiar word. Try typing 󱲺󱲠󱲧󱲢󱲷󱲢 (yapiri), the name of the script itself, or 󱲩󱲤󱲩󱲪󱲤󱲷󱲤󱲩 (kokborok), the name of the language. Watch the romanization line confirm each keypress as you go.

If you want to look up which key matches each sound, the Beginner's Guide lists every vowel and consonant with its pronunciation, and the Script Specification gives the full glyph inventory with IPA values and codepoints.

For questions about the keyboard, or to share something you composed, visit the Community page. The keyboard is a tool for the Tiprasa community — and every word typed in Yapiri is a step forward.