Devanagari Vowels

So far, the only Devanagari letters we have learned (क (ka), य (ya), र (ra), and म (ma)) have all been consonants—there have been no vowels, like the letters a, e, i, o, and u in English.

You have learned that Devanagari is a syllabary, because each consonant (except for the last consonant of each word) makes an entire syllable sound, ending with the a sound as in the English word, majority. Therefore, क (ka) makes not just the sound of the English k, but the entire ka syllable.

If you know any Hindi at all, you know that there are other vowel sounds in the language besides the sound represented by a. In fact, the words, Hindi and Devanagari themselves obviously have other vowel sounds besides a. The Devanagari script therefore has several vowel letters which modify the vowel sound of the syllable. If a consonant is followed by a vowel, it no longer makes its inherent a sound, but makes the sound of indicated by the vowel.

There are a some cases, of course, when the vowel sound does not follow a consonant, but is the first sound in the word. In this case, there is no a sound to change, and the vowel makes up the entire syllable without a consonant. Don't by confused by the distinction I'm making here. I'm only saying that sometimes a word begins with a vowel sound (such as the English, able) and sometimes the vowel sound comes after a consonant (as in the English word, table). In Devanagari, the vowel of the first example would make the sound all by itself, but in the second example it would change the inherent a sound to another vowel sound. Either way, the same vowel sound is made; you'll see why I make that distinction, later.

Things are further simplified because, just like consonants, the Devanagari vowels are phonetic. They have none of the pronunciation ambiguities found in English vowels. (For an example of such ambiguities, just compare the sounds created by the letter a found in the English words, apple, shake, awkward, and arrive.) A Devanagari vowel always makes the same sound, which is why we must agree upon a way to represent Hindi sounds using English letters. The sounds we have learned so far, along with their English representations, are the following:

You already know that there's (usually) no need to represent the a sound. Now you're ready to learn the Devanagari letter that represents the ā sound.