Mewati Language Letters

Mewati (मेवाती) is the language of Mewat (मेवात), the low, dry country around the northern Aravalli hills where Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh meet. It has no script of its own and no official spelling. In India it is written in Devanagari, the alphabet of Hindi, which is what Mewati speakers learn at school; Mewati itself lives mostly in speech, songs and sung stories; when people do write it, in a caption or a message for instance, there is no standard to follow, so each writer spells the words the way they sound.

Devanagari is an abugida. Every consonant carries a built-in short a, so क reads ka; any other vowel is added as a matra: का kā, कि ki, की kī, कु ku, के ke, को ko. The full vowel letters अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ए ऐ ओ औ stand only at the start of a word or after another vowel. The matra ि is written to the left of its consonant though it is said after it, the line along the top (the shirorekha) joins the letters of a word, and there are no capital and small letters.

The consonants run from the throat (क ख ग घ ङ) to the lips (प फ ब भ म), each row going plain, aspirated, voiced, voiced aspirated and nasal. The virama ् strips a consonant of its a so that it joins the next one: म्ह in म्हारो (mhāro, our), or the clusters क्ष, त्र and ज्ञ, which are typed as two letters with a virama between them.

Mewati letters and sounds

Mewati belongs with the Rajasthani languages, and its words show it. Many masculine words end in -o where Hindi has -ā: म्हारो (mhāro, our) and थारो (thāro, your) for Hindi हमारा and तुम्हारा. Words such as म्हारो begin with an aspirated m, म्ह, a sound standard Hindi rarely has at the start of a word, though it has it inside तुम्हारा; in Devanagari it is written as म + virama + ह.

The retroflex ण (ṇ, said with the tongue curled back) is much more frequent than in Hindi, because Mewati, like Haryanvi and Marwari, has ṇ where Hindi has n after a vowel: पाणी (pāṇī, water) for Hindi पानी. The dotted ड़ and ढ़ are flaps, a quick tap of the curled tongue, as in बड़ो (baṛo, big) and पढ़ (paṛh, read). Nasal vowels take the candrabindu ँ (हाँ, yes) or the anusvara ं (नूंह, the district town). ऋ, its matra ृ and the visarga ः appear only in Sanskrit words borrowed through Hindi.

How to type Mewati in Hindi letters

On a phone, add Hindi to Gboard on Android or iPhone, or the Hindi Transliteration keyboard on iPhone, then type the word in English letters, such as mhaaro mewat, and pick म्हारो मेवात from the suggestions. The same phones also offer a Devanagari layout where you tap the letters and matras directly.

On Windows, add Hindi under Settings → Time & language → Language & region and choose Devanagari – INSCRIPT or a phonetic layout; switch with Win+Space. On a Mac, add Hindi – Transliteration or Devanagari – QWERTY under System Settings → Keyboard → Input Sources and switch with Control+Space or the Globe key. With the English (India) keyboard on Windows, AltGr+4 (or Ctrl+Alt+4) types ₹.

ड़ and ढ़ can be stored as one character or as ड or ढ followed by the nukta ़; they look the same, and Unicode normalisation turns the one-character form into the two-character one, so if a search misses a word, try the other. In HTML a letter can be written by its code: ण is ण, ड़ is ड़, । is । and ₹ is ₹.

Where the Mewati language is spoken

CLDR estimates about 6.5 million Mewati speakers, all counted in India. Mewat is not a state but a cultural region: Nuh district in Haryana (called Mewat district until 2016), neighbouring parts of Alwar and Bharatpur in Rajasthan, and parts of Mathura district in Uttar Pradesh. So Mewati is spoken in Haryana and Rajasthan and in parts of Uttar Pradesh. The figure is an estimate; the Census of India counts Mewati as a mother tongue within Hindi, so its speakers are counted in the Hindi total.

Its best-known speakers are the Meos, a largely Muslim community of Mewat known for keeping their own clan traditions and oral epics, though Hindus of the region speak Mewati too. At Partition in 1947 many Meo families moved to Pakistan, where Mewati is still spoken at home; there, where Urdu is the language of school, people who write it use the Urdu script. Mewati shades into Haryanvi to the north and into the Rajasthani of Jaipur and Alwar to the south-west, and Ahirwati, spoken around Rewari, is close to it. For the same letters in standard form see the Hindi collection; for neighbours, the Haryanvi, Rajasthani, Marwari and Urdu ones; and for the flag and emoji, the India collection.

Mewati songs, stories and emoji

Music is an easy place to meet written Mewati. Modern Mewati singers post videos with titles and lyrics in Devanagari, and older traditions are still sung by Mewat's bards, among them the Jogis who accompany themselves on the bhapang, a small drum with one string that is plucked and pulled to bend the pitch. Meo bards also sing long epics in Mewati, including the Pandun ka Kada, a Meo telling of the Mahabharata.

In messages, 🙏 goes with a greeting, 🎶 with a song link, and 🌾 and 🐃 stand for village Mewat, a land of farming and cattle. The Mewati gharana of Hindustani classical music, the school of singing made famous by Pandit Jasraj, takes its name from the region too, so 🎶 and मेवाती घराना turn up together in posts about classical music.