The Devanāgarī (देवनागरी) script is used to write many Indian and Nepalese languages such as Hindi, Konkani, Sanskrit, Marathi,Maithili, Bhojpuri and Nepali. It is a phonetic system, meaning in principle, one letter always represents the same sound, which is relatively convenient. The sounds eu (like the French word "cheveu") and ü (like the French word "rue") don't exist.

The consonants are followed by the vowel अ (short a) by default, but this is not written out. The sign ् is used to indicate that a consonant is not followed by the default vowel. Consonants may be modified by each of the other vowels and in this case the dependent form of the vowel is written.

There are two main difficulties:

1. most consonants can be combined to form combinations.
2. the vowels are written differently depending on their position in a word - whether they are in the beginning or not and whether they follow a vowel or another consonant.

With this in mind, please continue reading this wikibook, which aims to teach more about the devanagari alphabet.

Chapters

1. Overview
2. Ligatures
3. Numbers
4. Alphabet
5. Vowels (स्वर)
6. Consonants
7. Exercises:
   1. Lesson 1
   2. Lesson 2