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Hindi Alphabet (Devanagari)

The letters and characters of Hindi written in the Devanagari script, in order — every standard character with its name and codepoint, the additional and punctuation sets, and exactly how many fonts include them. About 580,318,483 people read or write it across 6 countries.

Hindi is also written in: (Latin)

Standard characters

The minimal set of characters required for Hindi — the language's alphabet, in its traditional order. Tap a character to copy it; each name opens the full character page.

How the Hindi alphabet works

Hindi is written in Devanagari, from left to right, and the letters hang from a headline that runs along the top of each word. It is an abugida — a system between an alphabet and a syllabary: every consonant letter carries a built-in vowel, the short a, so क is not k but ka. To change the vowel you attach a sign (a matra) to the consonant — ा for aa, ि for i, ु for u and so on — and the independent vowel letters in the chart are used only when a vowel begins a word or follows another vowel.

To write a consonant with no vowel after it — above all, to write two consonants together — the slash under a letter (the virama) cancels its built-in a, and the two letters fuse into a joined shape: क् + ष becomes क्ष, त् + र becomes त्र. Spoken Hindi goes further and deletes many written a's by its own rules, so the name राम is said Ram, not Rama. A dot placed under a consonant (the nukta) borrows foreign sounds: ज़ is z, फ़ is f, क़ is the deep q — the everyday alphabet quietly extending itself for Urdu and English loanwords.

The consonants stand in a famous grid, arranged by where the mouth makes them — throat, palate, curled-back tongue, teeth, lips — and each stop comes in a family of four plus a nasal: plain and with a puff of air, unvoiced and voiced, as k, kh, g, gh, ng. The two t-families are the trap for English speakers: ट is made with the tongue curled back, त with the tongue on the teeth, and both differ from the English t. And फ, spelled ph, is simply pa with a puff of air — the f sound belongs to the dotted फ़ alone.

Additional Characters

Used for foreign words, names and technical terms, and older forms of the language.

Punctuation characters

The marks used to separate sentences and to clarify meaning.

Where Hindi (Devanagari) is read

Countries shaded by the share of their population that reads or writes Hindi in the Devanagari script.