Hindi
Type Hindi the way you text it: Latin letters in, Devanagari out. Plus InScript and Remington for typing the script directly.
Hindi ships three layouts. हिन्दी is the standard InScript keymap and it’s what you get when you add Hindi. Hindi phonetic is a QWERTY grid that turns romanized Hindi into Devanagari as you type, so kaise ho commits कैसे हो. Remington (GAIL) is the typewriter layout. This page is mostly about the phonetic one, because it’s the one with moving parts.
Turning it on
Section titled “Turning it on”Add Hindi, open its screen, and tap the Hindi phonetic card under Layouts to turn it on. Tap the InScript card on the same screen to turn it off if you don’t want both. Then do the one thing that makes the biggest difference: download the Hindi word list from the Dictionary row on that screen. Hindi ships no word list inside the app, and the next two sections explain why this layout cares about that more than most.
Until the list is there, the suggestion strip shows a Get the Hindi word list for better words chip the first time you switch to the layout. Tap it and it opens the same screen.
How it reads what you type
Section titled “How it reads what you type”Every key is where it is on the English layout. What you type shows up as Devanagari in the composing text straight away, with no separate conversion step, and the space commits it.
| You type | You get | Why |
|---|---|---|
tum, aap, naam | तुम, आप, नाम | “a” is the inherent vowel and writes nothing after a consonant; “aa” is आ |
mera, bhi, tu | मेरा, भी, तू | a vowel that ends a word is long, because Hindi never says a final short “a” |
jao, khao | जाओ, खाओ | an “a” running into “o” or “u” is long |
hindi, lamba, rang | हिंदी, लंबा, रंग | a nasal before the stop it belongs to is written as ं |
namaste, dost, kya | नमस्ते, दोस्त, क्या | these clusters join |
karna, sakta, uska | करना, सकता, उसका | these don’t, because the ending is its own piece of grammar |
pakka, baccha | पक्का, बच्चा | a doubled consonant joins |
roTi, paRhna | रोटी, पढ़ना | capitals spell the retroflex letters exactly |
Bahut | बहुत | a capital that spells nothing reads as its lowercase self |
Hindi phonetic key map
Section titled “Hindi phonetic key map”Every key the rules read. The same tables are in the app, under Key map on Hindi’s own screen (see Options).
Vowels. The first form is the letter on its own, the second the sign it becomes after a consonant. Shift gives the long vowels too, if you’d rather do that than double the letter.
| Key | Letter | After a consonant |
|---|---|---|
a | अ | nothing: the inherent vowel |
aa, A | आ | ा |
i | इ | ि |
ee, ii, I | ई | ी |
u | उ | ु |
oo, uu, U | ऊ | ू |
e | ए | े |
ai | ऐ | ै |
o | ओ | ो |
au, ou | औ | ौ |
RRi | ऋ | ृ |
Consonants.
k क | kh ख | g ग | gh घ | |
ch, c च | chh छ | j ज | jh झ | |
T ट | Th ठ | D ड | Dh ढ | N ण |
t त | th थ | d द | dh ध | n न |
p प | ph, f फ | b ब | bh भ | m म |
y य | r र | l ल | v, w व | |
sh श | Sh ष | s स | h ह | |
z ज़ | q क | R ड़ | Rh ढ़ | |
ksh क्ष | gy, jn ज्ञ | x क्स |
Signs. M is ं (anusvara) and H is ः (visarga). You rarely need M: a nasal before the stop it belongs to is written as ं on its own, as hindi shows. A capital that isn’t in these tables reads as its lowercase letter.
Why Hindi is harder than it looks
Section titled “Why Hindi is harder than it looks”Bangla’s Avro is a spelling scheme people learn: every cluster you type is a conjunct, and you press a key for the inherent vowel when you want it. Nobody learns a scheme for Hinglish. People write Hindi in Latin letters the way it sounds, and spoken Hindi drops its inherent vowel wherever it can. So the rn in karna is two syllables (करना) while the st in namaste is one conjunct (नमस्ते), and nothing in the spelling says which. The same goes for t, which is त in tum and ट in roti, and for a lone a, which is short in nazar and long in kitab.
The layout handles that in three layers, in this order.
- A list of known spellings, about 900 of them. Everyday words whose Latin spelling doesn’t carry enough to get the script right (
theekis ठीक,paniis पानी,nahiis नहीं), chat shorthand (his है,nhiis नहीं,kris कर,bhutis बहुत), and English loanwords (schoolis स्कूल,doctoris डॉक्टर). A spelling on the list is settled there, and it shows in the composing text the moment you finish typing it. - The Hindi word list, if you’ve downloaded it. What you typed and every word on the list are both reduced to a loose key. The key forgets aspiration, forgets whether a consonant is dental or retroflex, forgets conjuncts, forgets every “a” inside the word, and treats ड़ as either “d” or “r”. Words with the same key are candidates and the most frequent one leads. Details you did type count against a candidate that contradicts them:
kaamasks for a long vowel, so it gets काम even though कम is the commoner word, andthakgets थक rather than तक. Details you left out cost very little, because that’s how everyone types. Nasal marks nobody writes are forgiven too, sonahi,nahinandnhiall find नहीं. - The rules alone. They make the likelier guess: clusters stay apart unless they open or close the word, double a consonant, come before “y”, or are one of a short table of pairs that usually join (
tr,dr,sw, ansbefore t/p/k/m,rbefore the last consonant of the word). A grammatical ending (na,ne,ni,ta,te,ti,ka,ki,ke,ko,se,me,kar,wala) never joins the stem before it.
With the word list installed, layer 3 rarely decides anything. Without it, layer 3 decides every word that isn’t on the list in layer 1, and it will sometimes guess wrong. That’s why the strip also carries the other readings of what you typed: the same spelling with its last “a” long (pyar offers प्यार, sarkar offers सरकार), with every cluster joined, with none joined, and with the final vowel left short. Tap the one you meant.
A word from the list only takes the commit from the rules’ own reading when it’s at least twice as frequent, the same near-tie protection Bangla has, so the keyboard doesn’t swap the word you were looking at for one of about equal currency.
Glide typing
Section titled “Glide typing”Swiping over this layout draws a romanization, not a Hindi word, so the stroke is decoded against romanized spellings and the result is turned into Devanagari. The known-spellings list is always there for that. The Hinglish word list (about a million romanized spellings, under Hinglish in the language catalogue) widens it a lot if you download it, and each spelling a swipe decodes goes through the same three layers above. See Glide typing.
Converting text you already have
Section titled “Converting text you already have”With the layout on, selecting text puts two more chips on the selection bar. Hindi rewrites selected Hinglish in Devanagari, word by word, through the same three layers. Hinglish goes the other way and writes Devanagari back in Latin letters the way it’s said, so करना comes out karna and नमस्ते comes out namaste.
The typing test has a Hindi word list and quotations of its own, so it works before you’ve downloaded anything.
Editing
Section titled “Editing”Backspace inside a word you’re still typing removes one Latin letter per press, and the Devanagari redraws. Over text that’s already committed it removes one code point, or a whole conjunct if you turn on WM KeyboardLanguages & layoutsHindiClustersConjunct-aware backspace. That toggle is off by default and applies to all three Hindi layouts.
Options
Section titled “Options”- Layouts: InScript, Hindi phonetic, and Remington (GAIL), one card each, turned on and off independently.
- Key hints: WM KeyboardLanguages & layoutsHindiKey hintsShow the letter each key types. Off, Added, or Whole letter. It puts the Devanagari a key is about to write in its corner. It’s the same shared setting Bangla’s Avro uses, and it shows only while a transliterating layout is active.
- Key map: a folded group just below the hints while Hindi phonetic is on, with the same tables as the key map above. Full guide at the bottom, WM KeyboardLanguages & layoutsHindiKey mapFull guideNext release, opens this page in your browser.
- Spellings: WM KeyboardLanguages & layoutsHindiSpellingsUse known spellings, on by default. Switch it off for the letter-for-letter reading. Without a downloaded word list this leaves the rules on their own, so expect more wrong guesses.
- Dictionary words: WM KeyboardLanguages & layoutsHindiSpellingsCorrect to dictionary words, on by default. Off, space commits exactly what the rules spell instead of a word from the list that sounds like it, and the list’s words stay in the suggestion strip. This runs whether or not autocorrect is on.
- Also suggest from: with English picked, the phonetic layout’s strip also carries the word as you typed it in Latin letters, and an English words group appears right below: Type English words as English makes the space bar write
helloas hello, and Switch on the suggestion strip shows or hides the small button that turns that on and off while you type. See English on Avro and Hindi phonetic. - Numerals:
०-९or0-9. - Dictionary: the downloadable Hindi list has about 243,000 words. You can import your own as well, and imported words are found phonetically too.
- Clusters: conjunct-aware backspace, above.
Details & edge cases
Section titled “Details & edge cases”Hinglish is a different language, not this layout. Picking Hinglish · Hindi (Romanized) from the catalogue gives you a Latin QWERTY that stays Latin and suggests romanized words. Hindi phonetic is the opposite: it converts what you type into Devanagari.
The composing text can change its mind as you type. kar reads कर, karn closes on a cluster and reads कर्न, and the a that makes it an infinitive opens it back up to करना. What you see at each point is what a space would commit at that point.
The phonetic machinery only loads if the layout is on. Hindi with just InScript enabled builds none of it.
It’s new, and the rule table is a draft. The join table, the list of endings and the known spellings were written without a native speaker on hand. If a common word comes out wrong with the word list installed, say so on the issue and name the word.