Hindi Devanagari Sound Chart with Audio

Devanagari arranges its consonants by where and how they are made. This chart keeps that order, so you can see and hear the contrasts that matter: aspiration, breathy voice, and retroflex versus dental.

Tap a letter to hear it

Each cell shows the letter, its romanisation and IPA. The details and an example word appear below the chart.

Vowels (स्वर)

Stops and nasals (व्यंजन), by place and manner

Other consonants and nuqta letters

Select a letter to see its description and an example word.

Vowel signs (मात्रा) on क

How to read the chart

The main grid has five rows and five columns. Rows run from the back of the mouth to the front: velar (the back of the tongue against the soft palate), palatal, retroflex (the tongue tip curled back), dental (the tongue tip against the teeth) and labial (the lips). Columns show the manner: voiceless, voiceless aspirated (with a puff of air), voiced, breathy voiced (with a murmured release) and nasal.

English speakers need to pay most attention to three things the chart makes visible:

  • Columns 1 and 2: English does not distinguish unaspirated and aspirated consonants. In Hindi, pal "moment" and phal "fruit" are different words. See aspirated and breathy consonants.
  • Column 4: breathy-voiced consonants do not exist in English at all.
  • Rows 3 and 4: English t and d fall between Hindi's retroflex and dental series. See retroflex vs dental.

Vowel signs

Vowels at the start of a syllable use the independent letters in the first table. After a consonant, they are written as mātrā signs attached to it, shown in the last row: का kā, कि ki, की kī and so on. Note that the short i sign is written before the consonant but pronounced after it. The details are in Hindi vowels and mātrās.

The inherent vowel

A consonant with no vowel sign carries the inherent vowel a [ə], but it is often silent in Hindi words: कमल is kamal, not kamala. Learn the rules in schwa deletion, and start with the overview in Hindi pronunciation for English speakers.

Practise speaking

Once you can hear the contrasts, record yourself on the Hindi practice page, which shows which words a speech recogniser understood.

Frequently asked questions

How many letters are there in the Hindi alphabet?

It depends on how you count. The traditional list has 11 vowels (including ऋ) and 33 consonants, plus the anusvara and visarga, and the modern additions with a nuqta dot (क़ ख़ ग़ ज़ फ़ ड़ ढ़). Conjunct letters such as क्ष, त्र and ज्ञ are sometimes listed separately.

Why does the audio for a single consonant include a vowel?

Every Devanagari consonant letter includes the inherent vowel a [ə], so क is read "ka". Most voices read single letters that way, which is also how the alphabet is recited.

What is the romanisation used here?

A simplified form of the ISO 15919 / IAST scholarly system: long vowels have a macron (ā), retroflex consonants a dot below (ṭ), and h after a consonant marks aspiration (kh). The letter c is always the sound in "church".

Sources

  • Ohala, M. (1999). Hindi. In International Phonetic Association (ed.), Handbook of the International Phonetic Association, 100–103. Cambridge University Press.
  • Shapiro, M. C. (2003). Hindi. In G. Cardona and D. Jain (eds.), The Indo-Aryan Languages, 250–285. Routledge.
  • Snell, R. and Weightman, S. (2003). Teach Yourself Hindi. Hodder and Stoughton.
  • Kendriya Hindi Nideshalaya (2016). Devanagari Lipi tatha Hindi Vartani ka Manakikaran. Government of India.