Intro #3: Devanagari - The Hindi Alphabet!

So in Intro #1: About Hindi you may remember that it was briefly mentioned that Hindi is written in what’s called the Devanagari script. Here’s I’m going to introduce you to some of the main concepts of this. Obviously, you’re not going to learn to read and write overnight, so just take it slowly and work at it one step at a time. 

Devanagari, or देवनागरी , is the name of the alphabet that Hindi is written in. Devanagari is also used to write other languages, like Sanskrit, Nepali, Marathi etc. Each language has it’s own slight modification and this is just like how the Latin alphabet (the one we’re using here!) is used for other languages like Spanish and French, which have their own modifications; ie the letter é in French and ñ in Spanish.

The Devanagari letter ॐ aum, or ओम , represents the sound of the beginning of the Universe in the religion of Hinduism. Image source. 

When compared to English, Devanagari is actually a lot easier to read, believe it or not! Compare the ‘c’ sound in the words city and cat. The letter ‘c’ makes a two different sound right? This differences doesn’t exist in Devanagari because every letter has only one pronunciation and so this makes reading so much easier! 

One of its distinctive looks is the horizontal line thats above almost all the letters, it looks somewhat like a washing line with the letters hanging from it! In Devanagari there’s no such thing as capital letters. 

namaste aap kaise hain? - Hello, how are you? Notice how the letters hang from the ‘washing line’ shown in red. 

Because you won’t know what the Devanagari letters are as you start learning I’ll use what’s called a transliteration, this basically puts the Devanagari letters into English ones to help up pronounce a word. For example प्यार pyaar -means ‘Love’ in Hindi, where the pyaar is the transliteration and tells you how to pronounce the word. I’ll always put the transliteration in italics. 

You’ll find that our English punctuation ie : ; . , ” / ! ? & ( )  is usually used for Devanagari but sometimes you’ll see a । which is equivalent to a full stop. 

Hopefully this has given you enough background information for you to progress on to the Hindi Vowels and Hindi Consonants sections where you start to learn the letters of Devanagari in detail;

Hindi Vowels

Hindi Consonants

Are you having problems displaying Devanagari correctly on your computer? Have a look here to hopefully solve your issues.