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Devanagari is a script to write languages in India like Hindi, Sanskrit and Marathi. deva signifies 'heavenly' and nagari 'script of the city' in Sankrit. An often uses transcription variant is Devnagri.

Devanagari is partly phonetic in the sense that a word written in it can

only be pronounced in one way, but not all possible pronunciations can

be written perfectly.

Devanagari has 34 consonants ("vyanjan"), and 12 vowels ("svar"). A

syllable ("akshar") is formed by the combination of one or more

consonants and one vowel.

Vowel Pronunciation

a 'a' as in about

aa 'a' as in art

i 'i' as in pit

ii 'ee' as in wheel

u 'u' as in put

uu 'oo' as in soot

e 'a' as in rate

ai

o 'o' as in old

au

aM

aH

When no vowel is written, 'a' is assumed. To specifically denote the

absence of a vowel, a halant is used.

Consonants:

k  kh  g  gh
ch chh j  jh
T  Th  D  Dh  N
t  th  d  dh  n
p  ph  b  bh  m
y  r   l  v/w
sh shh s  h   L  ksh  gy/dny

The letters above are pronounced as in English, with the exceptions

of:

N

t

th

d 'th' as in the

dh

L

Among these, 'L' and 'N' are not used in Hindi. The entire set is

used in Marathi.

There is no distinction of case, i.e. no uppercase and lowercase

letters.

The ITRANS notation

is a lossless transliteration scheme of

Devanagari into English. The letters used to represent Devanagari

alphabets in this notation have approximately the same pronunciation

in English. It is widely used on Usenet.

In ITRANS, the word Devanagari is written as "devanaagarii".

Devanagari is also used to write Nepali.

(Note: "Devanagari" is the most common transliteration. Others are

"Devnagri", "Devanagri", "Deonagri"(rare).)

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