Devanagari script
देवनागरी
Devanagari is the script of Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Nepali, and a dozen other languages across the Indian subcontinent — around 600 million readers. It is an abugida: each consonant letter carries an inherent "a" vowel, and other vowels are written as attached marks around the consonant.
All 44 letters
History
Devanagari descends from the Brahmi script of the 3rd century BCE — the alphabet of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka. Over the next thousand years Brahmi evolved into the Nagari script of northern India, and around the 10th century Nagari picked up its distinctive horizontal headline (शिरोरेखा, shirorekha) — the bar that connects letters across the top of every word. The name देवनागरी means "city of the gods," reflecting its use for Sanskrit scriptures. Today it is the official script of India.
Things you might not know
- The horizontal line at the top of every word is called shirorekha and is not decorative — it is considered a defining feature of the script.
- Every consonant carries an invisible "a" by default. To cancel it, you write a virama (◌्) beneath the letter.
- Sanskrit grammar was analyzed by Panini around 500 BCE in such detail that modern linguistics still references his work — and his analysis drove the design of how Devanagari's sounds are organized.
- Consonant clusters combine into conjunct forms (ligatures), producing over 1,000 possible combined shapes — a major challenge for early computer typography.