devanagari

Devanagari, or Devanāgarī, is an abugida of the Brahmic family used for writing several languages in South Asia. It originated from the ancient Brahmi script through the Gupta and Siddhaṃ traditions and became the standard script for Sanskrit and for several modern languages. The name Devanāgarī derives from Sanskrit elements deva "god" and nāgarī "city script": the "script of the city of the gods."

Devanagari is written left to right and is easily recognized by its distinctive horizontal headline, the shirorekha, which runs over the top of the letters. Each consonant has an inherent vowel, typically a as the default, and vowel sounds are indicated with diacritics attached to the consonant. Vowel signs can appear before, after, above, or below the consonant. Conjunct consonants are formed by stacking consonants vertically; diacritics such as anusvara, chandrabindu, and visarga indicate nasalization and aspiration. A nukta marker is used in some languages to extend the phonetic range.

Devanagari's core inventory comprises 14 vowels and 33 consonants in its classical arrangement, plus several diacritic signs, numerals, and punctuation. The script is used by Sanskrit literature and a range of modern Indo-Aryan languages, including Hindi, Marathi, and Nepali, as well as Konkani and others, sometimes with language-specific variants.

In the digital era, Devanagari has been standardized in the Unicode standard (code range U+0900 to U+097F) and is supported by major fonts and software. It remains the dominant script for Hindi in India and is one of the most widely used scripts in South Asia for education, media, and government, as well as in scholarly and religious texts for Sanskrit.