Devanagari Font

Devanagari (देवनागरी), also called Nagari is a base language of the Nepal and India. Like most commoon Language it is written from left to right, does not have distinct letter cases, and is recognisable by a horizontal line that runs along the top of full letter. Devanagari is commonly used script for wrigin Sanskrit, Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, and Maithaili. It was also formaerly used to write Gujarati and because it is the standardised script for the Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, Devanagari has become one of the mose used and adopted writing system in the world.

How to write Devanagari Script?

To practise writing Devanagari it is best to use lined paper and to write on alternate lines. Note the following points

• The body of the Devanagari characters should occupy about two thirds of the space between the lines.
• In general the first stroke, or strokes, in a character are written from the left to the right and are then followed by any down strokes and finally the head stroke is added. Note that in some characters the head stroke is broken.
• The following pages show the characters with arrows added indicating the direction of the strokes as they are drawn and the order they are drawn in
• It is important to learn the correct stroke order for Devanagari characters as when, hopefully, you start to write quickly the character will be recognisable even if its form gets more cursive than is the case for printed Hindi.
• It normally takes between three and five strokes to write a Devanagari character. On separate sheets of paper practise writing the characters on the following pages noting the order and direction of strokes indicated for each character.

The Hindi sound system

The sound system (phonology) of modern spoken Hindi can be represented in a number of different scripts including Devanagari. In English Devanagari is often called a syllabary, rather than an alphabet, because each Devanagari character normally represents a consonant and a vowel combination or a vowel on its own. Devanagari's consonants are normally considered to have a basic form which consists of a consonant pronounced with an inherent ‘a’ sound similar to the vowel sound in the English words.

In other words each Devanagari character normally represents a complete syllable. Devanagari is relatively easy to learn because it is largely phonetic, that is to say that mostly the script is a representation of the actual sounds.