WRITING SYSTEM
Typing in Devanagari
3 languages here are written in Devanagari, and a written unit is often several keystrokes in a fixed order rather than one — 49 distinct characters turn up across 152 practice words. All 3 are typed on the Devanagari InScript layout, and Hindi has the widest bank to practise from at 59 words.
An abugida, where each consonant carries an inherent vowel that other marks replace. Marks attach above, below and beside the letter they modify, and consonants combine into conjunct forms, so one written unit is regularly two or three keystrokes. The InScript layout is the Indian government standard and arranges the script phonetically — the same arrangement serves Hindi, Marathi, Nepali and Sanskrit without modification.
What typing it involves
- Direction
- left to right
- Key inventory
- 49 distinct characters across 152 practice words
- Composition
- marks stack or join onto the letters they modify
- Input
- typed directly on the keys
- Devanagari keyboard layout
- Devanagari InScript
- Keyboard guide
- labels every key, for every language here
- The chart reaches
- 63% to 68% of what each language's words use
The Devanagari keyboard
Drawn from Hindi’s key map. All 3 languages here are typed on the same layout.
- left little finger
- left ring finger
- left middle finger
- left index finger
- thumb
- right index finger
- right middle finger
- right ring finger
- right little finger
Physical key labels appear above. हिन्दी layout labels appear below. These three rows produce 26 of the 41 characters the practice words here use; the rest are reached with a modifier or a dead key.
The characters you will type most
Counted across every practice word in all 3 languages below, most frequent first. These are the keys worth finding without looking.
- ा 60
- र 32
- न 30
- क 26
- ो 26
- ह 24
- स 21
- े 21
- त 19
- म 19
The longest practice word in this script is वेगवान in Marathi, and the widest bank to practise from is Hindi at 59 words.
The 3 languages written in Devanagari
Other writing systems
- Bengali Closely related to Devanagari and just as much an abugida, with a distinctive headline running along the top of most letters.
- Ethiopic An abugida: the one the word is named after, from the Ge'ez letters a-bu-gi-da.
- Han Logographic: each character represents a word or a meaningful part of one, and there are tens of thousands.
There is a written guide for this script: Hindi typing: InScript, Mangal and Kruti Dev. Two incompatible traditions, and one of them is not Devanagari at all. Which name is a font, which is a layout, and which one to learn.
Every script this site teaches, with the languages written in each, is on the languages hub. If your computer does not produce these characters yet, that is a setting rather than a missing keyboard — adding a keyboard layout covers it for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS. The rest of the written guides cover what is the same whichever script you are in: posture, the home row, and why speed follows accuracy rather than the other way round.