Complete Assamese bornomala chart with swarabarna, byanjanbarna, the Assamese-only letters, signs, conjuncts and numerals, each letter with its Assamese name, IPA and Devanagari equivalent. Tap any letter to hear it, and print the chart.
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Assamese charts teach 52 letters: 11 swarabarna (vowels) and 41 byanjanbarna entries. Before quoting that number, know what is inside it. Those 41 entries are not 41 ordinary consonants: they are 33 pure consonants, plus ক্ষ, plus the 3 nukta forms, plus khanda-ta (ৎ), plus the 3 signs (ং ঃ ঁ) which are diacritic marks rather than letters. Counting only the base letters gives 44. This is common teaching usage, not an official standard: no body enumerates an Assamese letter count. Both readings are shown below, with sources.
The alphabet has 11 vowel letters but Assamese uses only eight vowel sounds, so several letters double up. The notes below are read from the same data as the chart:
Assamese and Bengali share one script (the Bengali-Assamese script), so the two alphabets look almost identical on the page. They are not the same alphabet. The written difference is small and countable; the difference in sound is large, and it is what most learners actually need.
Reading Assamese with Bengali pronunciation gets these wrong. The biggest one: Assamese turns the three sibilants into a velar fricative /x/, a sound no other major Indo-Aryan language uses this way, which is why সাত is said "xat" and not "saat".
Assamese has no ch affricate: this is a plain /s/, where Bengali চ is /tʃ/. Its name prothom so means first s.
The aspirated partner of চ, /sʰ/, not Bengali /tʃʰ/. Its name dwitio so means second s.
A plain /z/, where Bengali জ is /dʒ/. Called borgiyo zo, the z inside the five stop rows.
The breathy partner of জ, /zʱ/, not Bengali /dʒʱ/.
Assamese has lost the retroflex-dental contrast: this is /t/, the same sound as ত. Bengali keeps ট as retroflex /ʈ/.
Said /tʰ/, the same as থ; the retroflex-dental contrast is not made in Assamese.
Said /d/, the same as দ. Bengali keeps ড as retroflex /ɖ/.
Said /dʱ/, the same as ধ.
Said /n/, identical to ন; the spelling distinction is historical.
Sounds /z/, like জ. Called ontohstho zo, the z that sits between the stop rows and the sibilants.
One of the two letters Assamese encodes for itself (U+09F0). Bengali writes র for the same slot, and Assamese reads it as an approximant /ɹ/.
The other Assamese-specific letter (U+09F1). Principally /w/, sometimes closer to [β]. Bengali has no separate letter for this and writes ব.
Commonly a velar fricative /x/, the sound that most marks Assamese out from Bengali (which says /ʃ/). Loanwords and some dialects keep /s/.
Also commonly /x/. The three sibilants are told apart by name, not by sound.
Also commonly /x/, which is why সাত is said xat and not saat.
These three are diacritic marks that modify a sound and are not pronounced on their own. The standard chart lists them at the end of the byanjanbarna, which is how the teaching count reaches 52. Tap a sign to read what it does.
অনুস্বৰ (anuxor)
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বিসৰ্গ (bixorgo)
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চন্দ্ৰবিন্দু (chandrabindu)
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Juktakhor are single glyphs formed by joining two or more consonants (for example ক + ্ + ষ gives ক্ষ). Assamese has around 122 of them; here are 6 common ones. The joining sign ্ is called hosonto.
Assamese adds one mark the Bengali alphabet does not use: an apostrophe-like sign called the urdho comma (উৰ্ধ কমা), written above a vowel to change its quality. Assamese has eight vowel sounds but no letter for two of them, so অ and এ take the mark to cover the gap: plain অ is /ɔ/ while অʼ is /o/, so কʼ reads /ko/ where ক reads /kɔ/. (That /o/ belongs to অʼ, not to ও, which Assamese reads /ʊ/.) It is a spelling aid rather than a separate letter, so it is not counted in either total above.
This is a practical sequence for a beginner, not a syllabus. School primers set the teaching order actually used in classrooms; the letter counts above come from common chart usage cross-referenced with the Unicode Bengali block, not from an official government count.
Bengali varnamala chart with swarabarna, byanjanbarna, signs, yuktakshar and numerals, each letter shown beside its Hindi (Devanagari) equivalent. Tap to hear or print.
bengali varnamalaHindi varnamala chart with all 46 letters per Govt of India: swar, vyanjan, sanyukt akshar, special signs and numerals, with tap-to-hear audio.
hindi varnamalaGujarati varnamala (kakko) chart with swar, vyanjan, signs, barakhadi, jodakshar and numerals, each letter shown beside its Devanagari equivalent. Tap to hear or print.
gujarati varnamalaTL;DR
Assamese charts teach 52 letters: 11 swarabarna (vowels) + 41 byanjanbarna entries, and the Assamese Wikipedia states both figures directly. Read the inclusion rule before quoting 52, because the 41 are not 41 ordinary consonants: they are 33 pure consonants, plus ক্ষ, plus the 3 nukta forms, plus khanda-ta ৎ, plus 3 signs (ং ঃ ঁ) that are diacritic marks, not letters. Counting only base letters gives 44. No body enumerates an official Assamese count, so neither figure is a government standard. Assamese shares the Bengali-Assamese script with Bengali and differs from it in three letters (ৰ, ৱ, ক্ষ) but differs far more in sound: the sibilants শ ষ স are commonly /x/, there are no ch or j affricates, and the retroflex and dental rows have merged. This page gives every letter its Assamese name, IPA and Devanagari equivalent, with tap-to-hear where an Assamese voice exists, and a one-tap browser print.
The two figures answer different questions rather than contradicting each other. The Assamese Wikipedia says plainly that modern Assamese has 11 vowels and 41 consonant letters, and its own table enumerates exactly those 41 rows. Crucially, the last four rows of that table are ৎ, ং, ঃ and ঁ. That is the direct evidence that the 41 bundles khanda-ta and the three signs, and it is why this page discloses the inclusion rule instead of presenting 52 as 52 atomic letters. Break the 41 down and you get 33 pure consonants, ক্ষ, the three nukta forms ড় ঢ় য়, khanda-ta ৎ, and the three signs ং ঃ ঁ. Strip out everything that is not a base letter and 11 plus 33 gives 44, the stricter reading of the same inventory. A related figure worth not confusing with these: Assamese has 11 vowel LETTERS but only eight vowel sounds, because several letters have merged in speech. Neither number is decreed: unlike Hindi, which has the Central Hindi Directorate, Assamese has no body that enumerates an official alphabet count. The Asam Sahitya Sabha is the language's foremost literary organisation, but it does not publish a letter count, so it is cited here as a language authority and never as the source of the number 52.
Assamese and Bengali are written in one shared script, correctly called the Bengali-Assamese script, so a page of Assamese and a page of Bengali look almost the same. The alphabets are not identical. The Assamese Wikipedia states the written difference as three letters: ৰ, ৱ and ক্ষ. Two of those, ৰ (ro, U+09F0) and ৱ (wo, U+09F1), are genuinely Assamese-only encoded letters; Bengali writes র where Assamese writes ৰ, which makes it a quick way to tell the two apart on sight. The third, ক্ষ, needs care: Assamese orders it as a separate letter of the alphabet, but Unicode encodes it as the sequence ক + ্ + ষ, exactly as in Bengali, where the same sequence is treated as an ordinary conjunct. It is a difference in listing, not in encoding, and it is worth stating precisely because "an independent consonant" would wrongly imply an independent codepoint.
Treating Assamese as "Bengali with two extra letters" is the common mistake, and it is a pronunciation trap. The sound systems diverge much more than the letterforms do. Assamese pronounces all three sibilants শ ষ স as a velar fricative /x/ (so সাত, seven, is xat, not saat), a value no other major Indo-Aryan language uses this way; Bengali reads them close to /sh/. Assamese has no affricates at all, so চ and ছ are /s/ and /sʰ/ and জ and ঝ are /z/ and /zʱ/, where Bengali has /tʃ/ and /dʒ/. And the retroflex and dental stop rows have merged, so ট and ত are both /t/ while Bengali keeps /ʈ/ against /t̪/. Sources give the sibilant range as /x/ to /s/, so this is the common standard-Assamese pattern with loanword and dialect exceptions, not an absolute rule. If you are learning the other language, or want to compare the two charts letter by letter, the Bengali varnamala chart covers the same script with Bengali letter names, Bengali sound values and a Hindi equivalent column.
Like other Brahmi-derived scripts, Assamese orders its consonants by where each sound is produced in the mouth, from the throat forward. The 25 core stop consonants form five rows:
That is the 33 pure consonants. The chart then appends ক্ষ, the three nukta forms ড় ঢ় য়, khanda-ta ৎ and the three signs, reaching the 41 entries that give the teaching total of 52. Because so many letters share a sound in modern Assamese, several are told apart by name rather than by pronunciation, which is why the chart shows each letter's Assamese name: তালব্য শ, মূৰ্ধন্য ষ and দন্ত্য স all sound alike, as do মূৰ্ধন্য ট and দন্ত্য ত. Assamese also uses one mark Bengali does not, an apostrophe-like urdho comma written after a vowel (অʼ, এʼ) to separate sounds that would otherwise be spelled the same.
Audio playback uses an Assamese (as-IN) voice installed on your device through the Web Speech API; it is not a native recording, and most devices do not ship one, so the disabled state is common. There is deliberately no Bengali voice fallback, because a Bengali voice would mispronounce the Assamese sibilants and the ch and j rows. No audio files are hosted on this site. The 52 and 44 counts above are read from the tool's data file and pinned by unit tests in __tests__/lib/assamese-alphabet-data.test.ts; every Assamese example word on this page was verified against a dictionary or corpus source before publication, with the method recorded in docs/evidence/assamese-alphabet-sources.md. Last reviewed and sources accessed on July 21, 2026.