Hindi Alphabet & Letters

Hindi is written in Devanagari, the script it shares with Marathi, Nepali, Sanskrit, Bhojpuri, Awadhi and Maithili. Letters hang from a horizontal headline, the shirorekha, which joins the letters of a word: नमस्ते, हिंदी. There are no capital and small letters, and the script is read left to right.

Devanagari is an abugida: every consonant carries an inherent vowel /ə/ (often romanized as a), so क is ka and म is ma. To write another vowel, you add a sign called a matra to the consonant: का kā, कि ki, की kī, कु ku, कू kū, कृ kṛ, के ke, कै kai, को ko, कौ kau. The ि of कि is written before the consonant although it is pronounced after it. The full vowel letters अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ऋ ए ऐ ओ औ are used only where a syllable begins with a vowel: आम (mango), ऊपर (up), the ई of आई (came).

Spoken Hindi deletes many inherent schwas, a process called schwa deletion. राम is said Rām, not Rāma; कमला is Kamlā; सड़क is saṛak. Writing does not mark which schwas are deleted; their pronunciation follows Hindi's schwa-deletion patterns.

One common school count of the Hindi varnamala gives 52 letters: 11 vowels, अं and अः, 33 consonants, the four conjuncts क्ष त्र ज्ञ श्र and the two flapped letters ड़ ढ़. Charts differ on what they count, so you will also see 44, 48 or 49; the letters on this page are the same either way.

Hindi consonants, half letters and the nukta

The 33 consonants are arranged by where they are made in the mouth: क ख ग घ ङ at the soft palate, च छ ज झ ञ at the hard palate, ट ठ ड ढ ण with the tongue curled back, त थ द ध न at the teeth, प फ ब भ म at the lips, then य र ल व and श ष स ह. Each row runs voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, voiced unaspirated, voiced aspirated and nasal: काल (time) and खाल (skin) contrast aspiration, while गाल (cheek) differs in voicing. In everyday Hindi ष sounds like श, and ङ ञ appear mostly in Sanskrit spellings.

The virama or halant ् removes the built-in a so consonants can join into half letters and conjuncts: स् + त = स्त in नमस्ते, क् + ष = क्ष, ज् + ञ = ज्ञ (said gya in Hindi, as in ज्ञान). र changes shape in clusters: on top as a hook in धर्म, below as a stroke in प्र and ट्र. Your font draws these shapes; you only type the letters and the virama.

The nukta ़ is the dot under a letter. Under ड and ढ it makes Hindi's own flapped r sounds: पेड़ (tree), पढ़ना (to read). Under क ख ग ज फ it writes sounds from Persian, Arabic and English: क़लम, ख़बर, ग़ज़ल, ज़िंदगी, फ़िल्म. The dot can change the word: ज़रा is "a little" but जरा is "old age", and फ़न is "art, skill" while फन is a cobra's hood. Many writers omit these dots even in published Hindi; usage varies by word and writer. Typed text usually stores क़ as two characters, क followed by ़, and the two forms look the same.

Hindi nasal marks, ऑ for English words, and Hindi punctuation

The anusvara ं (bindu) and the candrabindu ँ mark nasal sounds. The anusvara usually stands for a nasal consonant before another consonant (हिंदी, गंगा), the candrabindu for a vowel spoken through the nose (हँसना, माँ, गाँव). They can separate words: हंस is a swan, हँस means "laugh!". Where a matra sits on top of the letter, the candrabindu is written as a plain dot: में, नहीं, हैं. The name of the language itself appears both as हिंदी and as हिन्दी; both are correct, and the government's standard spelling prefers हिंदी.

English words brought a new vowel, the open o of ball and doctor, written with the half-moon: ऑ and its matra ॉ. It keeps बॉल (ball) apart from बाल (hair), and it is everywhere in कॉलेज, ऑफ़िस, डॉक्टर, कॉफ़ी. Its sister ऍ ॅ for the vowel of English bat is rare in Hindi and more at home in Marathi. The visarga ः appears in Sanskrit words such as दुःख and अतः; the avagraha ऽ marks an elided vowel in Sanskrit (सोऽहम्) and is sometimes used to show a drawn-out sound.

Hindi may end a sentence with the danda । or a Latin full stop .: मैं घर जा रहा हूँ। The double danda ॥ closes a verse in poetry and prayers. Commas, question and exclamation marks and quotation marks are the same as in English. The small circle ॰ is the Devanagari abbreviation sign, as in डॉ॰ for doctor, though many writers use a full stop instead. Numbers can be written with Devanagari digits ० १ २ ३ ४ ५ ६ ७ ८ ९ or with 0–9; India's constitution makes 0–9, the "international form of Indian numerals", the official ones, so you see both. Please do not use the vertical bar | for a danda: it looks close, but search, screen readers and line breaking treat it as a different character.

How to type Hindi on a computer, phone and WhatsApp

Windows: Settings → Time & language → Language & region → add Hindi, then pick a keyboard: Hindi Traditional is the government InScript layout with one key per letter (d is the virama, so k d k gives क्क), and Hindi Phonetic lets you type Hindi on an English keyboard (namaste → नमस्ते). Switch with Windows + Space. The same keyboard types Hindi in MS Word; Windows' built-in Hindi fonts are Nirmala UI and Mangal. The English (India) layout gives ₹ with Right Alt + 4.

Mac: System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources → add Hindi and choose Devanagari (InScript), Devanagari – QWERTY or Hindi – Transliteration, which turns Latin typing into Hindi as you go. iPhone: Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards → Add New Keyboard → Hindi, with a Devanagari or a Transliteration layout. Android: in Gboard or SwiftKey, add Hindi; the transliteration option lets you type aap kaise ho and pick आप कैसे हो. WhatsApp, Instagram and SMS use whichever of these keyboards your phone has; there is no separate WhatsApp setting.

Kruti Dev and old fonts: many offices and typing exams still use Kruti Dev, a pre-Unicode font that draws Hindi shapes over Latin letters. Text typed in it turns into a jumble of Latin letters and signs when pasted elsewhere or opened without the font. Unicode Hindi, the kind on this page and in Mangal or Nirmala UI, pastes correctly anywhere. For single characters, copy them from the grid above; in HTML the danda is ।, ॥ is ॥ and ₹ is ₹.

Where the Hindi language is spoken

Hindi is the main language of North and Central India, the "Hindi belt": Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Delhi, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. Hindi in Devanagari is the official language of India's central government, alongside English; it is one of the 22 languages of the constitution's Eighth Schedule. India's constitution names no national language, so "is Hindi the national language of India?" has the careful answer: official, not national.

Speaker counts are estimates and depend on what is counted. India's 2011 census recorded about 528 million people giving Hindi as their mother tongue, but that figure groups in Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Rajasthani and dozens of other languages; narrower estimates put native speakers near 345 million. Counting people who speak it as a second language, the total passes 600 million, and CLDR estimates about 580 million Hindi users in India. Outside India, Hindi or Fiji Hindi is an official language of Fiji, and Hindi speakers live in the United States, Canada, South Africa, Nepal and the United Kingdom, among other countries. Fiji, Mauritius, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago have large communities of Indian descent, but these descend largely from indentured workers whose home languages were Bhojpuri and Awadhi; at home they speak Fiji Hindi, Bhojpuri, Sarnami (Surinamese Hindustani) or, in Trinidad, mostly English and Creole, so standard Hindi there is mainly a language of film, song and religion.

Spoken Hindi and Urdu are close enough that everyday conversation flows between them: same grammar, same core words. They part ways in script (Urdu uses the Perso-Arabic script) and in formal vocabulary, which Hindi draws from Sanskrit and Urdu from Persian and Arabic. See also the collections for Urdu, Fiji Hindi, Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Maithili, Nepali, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati and Bangla, and the country pages for India 🇮🇳 and Fiji 🇫🇯. India's rupee sign ₹, adopted in 2010, blends the Devanagari र with the Latin R; older texts and some neighbours use ₨ or write रु.