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Quarter hours, number words and digits

The sample above says साढ़े बारह for 12.30 and सवा बारह for 12.15, which is how everyday Hindi tells the time and measures quantities. सवा adds a quarter, साढ़े adds a half and पौने takes a quarter away. One and a half and two and a half have words of their own, डेढ़ and ढाई, so half past one is डेढ़ बजे and half past two is ढाई बजे, not साढ़े एक or साढ़े दो; on its own, पौन बजा means a quarter to one. The Central Hindi Directorate, the Ministry of Education body that standardises Hindi spelling, lists these readings in its standardisation booklet. When a time or a quantity was said this way, read it back against what you meant.

Hindi has a distinct word for every number up to a hundred, and the Directorate publishes a standard list of them because pronunciation and spelling vary between Hindi-speaking regions. Most numbers ending in nine are named as one short of the next ten, so उनचास is 49 and उनसठ is 59. Two-digit numbers, phone numbers and amounts are the first things to proofread.

Digits come in two forms. Article 343 of the Constitution makes the international form of Indian numerals (1, 2, 3) the form for the official purposes of the Union, and also provides for Devanagari numerals (१, २, ३) to be authorised alongside them. Large amounts are spoken in लाख and करोड़, and Indian digit grouping writes twelve lakh as 12,00,000. Whichever form your document uses, compare it with what the recogniser returned.

Devanagari, English loanwords and Urdu

The tool opens with Hindi (India), code hi-IN, already selected, and that is the only Hindi setting it offers. Speech comes back in Devanagari. Pick the language before you press Start dictating: changing it mid-session stops listening for a moment and restarts with the new setting.

English words are the unpredictable part. Everyday Hindi is full of them, from ऑफिस and मीटिंग to whole phrases, and the recogniser may write a borrowed word in Devanagari or in Latin letters without being consistent about which. Google's own speech researchers have written about the same word turning up in both scripts as a known problem in Hindi-English speech recognition. If a sentence is mostly English with a few Hindi words, English (India) in the same menu is the better fit; if it is mostly Hindi, stay on Hindi (India).

Hindi and Urdu share most of their everyday spoken vocabulary, but this setting always writes Devanagari, and the tool has no Urdu option, so it cannot give you Urdu script.

The danda, Hindi's one mark of its own

Standard Hindi has one punctuation mark of its own. The Central Hindi Directorate says Hindi uses the same marks as English for everything except the full stop. The full stop is the पूर्ण विराम, the upright stroke । usually called the danda. Commas, semicolons, brackets, quotation marks, and question and exclamation marks are the familiar ones.

You will also see a Latin full stop in Hindi text, particularly online, and the Unicode Standard acknowledges both. Choose one for a document and keep to it. The double danda ॥ marks the end of a verse in traditional texts; it does not replace the danda in ordinary sentences.

Putting the danda in is a keyboard job. On the Windows Hindi Traditional keyboard it is Shift plus the full stop key. With no Hindi keyboard to hand, copy the । from the end of the sample above rather than typing a vertical bar |: the two look alike, but to a computer they are unrelated characters, so a search for । will skip every bar. If you would rather say it, Windows 11 voice typing turns a spoken पूर्ण विराम into ।, as the list of other dictation options below explains.

Spelling variants: हिंदी or हिन्दी, हँस or हंस

Hindi spelling has accepted variants, so settle on one before a document goes out. The Directorate's standard prefers the anusvara form हिंदी to हिन्दी. To software the two are different text, and even different lengths: the Characters counter under the box reads five for हिंदी and six for हिन्दी, because the half न of the second is stored as न followed by a halant. Search for both spellings before you decide a word is missing.

Chandrabindu and anusvara are the pair that changes meaning. The standard keeps the chandrabindu wherever dropping it would cause confusion, as between हँस (laugh) and हंस (swan), and in the plurals of feminine nouns such as लड़कियाँ. Where a vowel sign already sits above the top line, the dot alone is written instead: में, भैंस. The Directorate notes that newspapers, magazines and sometimes even textbooks put the dot where the chandrabindu belongs, so do not take a printed source as the tiebreaker.

The same standard drops the nukta dot from Urdu-origin words Hindi has absorbed, writing कलम rather than क़लम, and gives English loanwords the ॉ sign for the open o of office and college: ऑफिस, कॉलेज. Both nukta and plain forms are in wide use. Pick a house style and fix variants in one pass after you paste the text into your editor.

Correcting Hindi text by keyboard

The danda and any misheard word need a Hindi keyboard of some kind. There are two families: InScript, the layout standardised by the Government of India, where every key carries a Devanagari letter, and phonetic input, where you spell Hindi in Roman letters and choose from the Devanagari words it suggests.

• Windows 11 has one of each, and Microsoft's own walkthrough types बगीचा, garden, on both. Hindi Traditional, the InScript layout installed with the language, takes five keys: Y, I, R, semicolon, E. Hindi Phonetic, which you add afterwards from Hindi's Language options, takes the Roman spelling bagicha and swaps in बगीचा when you press Enter. The language itself goes in under Settings, Time & language, Language & region.
• Mac and iPhone: if you already touch-type InScript, Hindi (InScript) is on both; if you think in Roman spelling, choose Hindi (Transliteration). On a Mac they are input sources under System Settings, Keyboard, Text Input; on an iPhone, keyboards under Settings, General, Keyboard, Keyboards.
• Android: Gboard offers Hindi either as a Devanagari keyboard or as a transliteration keyboard that turns Roman spelling into Hindi script, and has a separate Hinglish option for people who switch between Hindi and English as they type.
• Kruti Dev files: a lot of older Hindi office work was typed in Kruti Dev, a pre-Unicode font that stores each Devanagari shape as an ordinary Latin character, and it has long been used for Hindi typing practice. Text from this page is Unicode, so the two do not mix: the same word is different data in each, and Kruti Dev text turns into Latin gibberish in any other font. Convert the old file to Unicode first, then paste your dictation into it.

Hindi dictation elsewhere, and who adds the danda

Hindi recognition is widely available; spoken punctuation is not. What each option does about the danda is the thing to compare.

• Windows 11 voice typing supports Hindi; start it with the Windows logo key and H. According to Microsoft's command list, पूर्ण विराम and फुल स्टॉप both give ।, अल्प विराम and कॉमा give a comma, प्रश्नवाचक चिन्ह gives a question mark and नई पंक्ति starts a new line. It listens in the language of the active keyboard, so change to a Hindi keyboard before you start, and it works only while you are online. The older Windows 10 dictation feature does not list Hindi.
• Google Docs: open Voice typing from the Tools menu; Google supports it in Chrome, Edge and Safari. Hindi is in its language list, but Google's help says the voice commands, including punctuation, are English-only and need English set as both the account language and the document language. A Hindi document there gets its dandas from the keyboard.
• Gboard on Android: with a Hindi keyboard active, the microphone key dictates Hindi. Automatic punctuation belongs to Google's advanced voice typing on Pixel 6 and later phones, and Google lists six languages for that feature; Hindi is not one of them.
• iPhone and Mac: Apple lists Hindi (India) for Dictation, and it is the only Indian language besides English (India) on that list. Apple does not list Hindi for on-device dictation or for automatic punctuation. On a Mac, add it in System Settings, Keyboard, Dictation, under Languages.

Regional Hindi, phrasing and word endings

Hindi is the most widely spoken first language in India. In the 2011 Census, 52.83 crore people, 43.63 per cent of the population, were counted under Hindi as their mother tongue, a total that groups several dozen mother tongues under the Hindi label, among them Bhojpuri, Rajasthani, Chhattisgarhi and Magahi, each with millions of speakers of its own. This tool has one Hindi setting for all of them. Words that belong to your mother tongue rather than to standard Hindi are the ones to watch, so when the text is going to a wider audience, say the standard Hindi word.

• Say each phrase in one breath, postpositions and auxiliaries included: घर जा रहा हूँ rather than four separate words with pauses between them. The recogniser leans on the words around each word to decide what it heard.
• Hindi separates dental from retroflex consonants (दाल, lentils, and डाल, branch) and plain from aspirated ones (पल, a moment, and फल, fruit). Clear articulation helps the recogniser choose, and these pairs deserve a glance when you proofread.
• Hindi verbs agree with the gender of the speaker: a man writes मैं जा रहा हूँ and a woman मैं जा रही हूँ, and the same goes for था and थी, गया and गई. The two forms are one vowel sign apart, so a misheard ending still reads as good Hindi while saying the wrong thing about who is speaking. Check these endings in anything written in the first person.