Bodo (India) style guide

Apply these local conventions alongside the house voice and localization review. Source acknowledgments are in credits.

Address and terminology

Use a respectful, friendly register. Address one reader as नोंथां and several readers as नोंथांमोन. Keep the number of people addressed distinct from the number of files or other objects in the message. Marketing may be more conversational; privacy explanations and warnings still need precise conditions.

Use approved Bodo terminology consistently. Rewrite English sentence order when needed, but retain who acts, what changes and any uncertainty. A possible new appearance must not become a promised improvement in privacy or security. For disputed spellings, have a proficient reviewer check an appropriate Bodo dictionary and the product context.

Letters and punctuation

This page covers Bodo in Devanagari. Devanagari has no uppercase/lowercase distinction; retained Latin text still does. Preserve FontLab, PNG and case-sensitive identifiers exactly.

Use ʼ (U+02BC) for the linguistic apostrophe, including the tone mark in खरʼ. It is not the quotation mark ’ (U+2019). Do not let smart-quote replacement alter it. Preserve spelling marks such as the nukta in ड़; a dot typed after a letter is not a substitute for the combining mark.

For declarative sentences in this guide's Bodo prose, use the danda । (U+0964). The similar-looking ৷ is a Bengali currency character, not this sentence terminator. Complete sentence bullets take sentence punctuation; short labels do not acquire a danda merely because they appear in a list.

Apply punctuation to surrounding prose. Use quotation marks for quotations, not decorative emphasis, and keep punctuation inside literal input unchanged. Prefer recasting a long dash-separated sentence to inserting more dashes.

Abbreviations and technical notation

Abbreviate only when readers can recognize the result. Localized abbreviation spellings and punctuation need term-by-term review. Distinguish them from international unit symbols: km, m and mm identify different units and must not collapse into one abbreviation. Symbols do not acquire plural endings or abbreviation dots.

Use familiar retained abbreviations such as WWW and PNG consistently. If an acronym needs explanation, provide the correct expansion and local explanation on first use. DNS expands to Domain Name System; a DNS server is one component, not the expansion of the name.

Keep a value and unit together, as in 30 cm or 20 °C. The degree sign alone does not identify Celsius. In mathematical prose, use the minus sign in −10 °C, not an en dash. Preserve command-line hyphens and literal source values. See technical notation.

Dates, time and interface review

Use day–month–year order for ordinary numeric dates, such as 25/03/2025. When the source gives only a month and year, retain that precision. For time, use the format required by the surface; a 12-hour value needs its period indicator when otherwise ambiguous, and a 24-hour field must not silently change to 12-hour display.

Follow the locale formatter for percentages; the Bodo Latin-digit pattern gives 75%. Keep literal version strings such as 4.2 unchanged. In running prose, use आरो for the conjunction; retain & when it belongs to a protected name, resource token or literal input.

Do not add a person's gender to a role merely to make the wording explicit. Choose respectful disability terminology for the actual context. Use accessible content and interface actions: changing every pointer instruction to “select” can change the operation. Test full messages, substituted values, count forms and line wrapping with a proficient Bodo reviewer.