Hindi is the official language of India. Modern Standard Hindi, which we will learn in this course, is based on the dialect spoken in North India and used as the lingua franca in central, eastern, and western India.

Hindi is written phonetically from left to right. It has 10 vowels and 35 consonants, as well as several compound characters.

The table above represents the consonant letters in combination with the inherent vowel -a. The inherent vowel is usually omitted in word endings. Notes: 1. In Hindi, consonant sounds can be divided into four types according to voicing and aspiration. Take t/d, for example: a. त / ta is voiceless unaspirated (like “t” in “study”) b. थ / tha is voiceless aspirated (like “t” in “tank”) c. द / da is voiced unaspirated (like “d” in “dance”) d. ध / dha is voiced aspirated (no equivalent in English, pronounced with a strong burst of breath). 2. Most sounds transliterated with a capital letter (such as ट / Ta, ठ / Tha, ड / Da, ढ / Dha, ण / Na, ष / Sa, ड़ / Ra) are retroflex sounds. You need to pronounce retroflex sounds with the tip of the tongue curled back toward the hard palate. 3. Most consonants with a subscript dot (such as ख़ / Kha, ज़ / za, फ़ / fa) are used in loan words from Persian, Arabic, and English, except for ड़ / Ra, which is a native variation of र / ra.

In Hindi, consonant-vowel syllables are written as units. Each unit is based on a consonant letter with an additional diacritic mark representing a vowel.

*Note: romanized as “ma” in word endings.

There are also some special characters that mostly (but not always) appear in loan words, such as:

Hindi uses the same punctuation marks as English with one exception: the dot at the end of the sentence is written as |