Within India, Hindi is official in the following states: Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and the National Capital Territory of Delhi. Sanskrit, the primary Hindu liturgical language, is also usually written in Devanagari, including in regions where the local language is not written in Devanagari. Marathi is the official language of the Indian state of Maharashtra and is co-official in Goa. Hindi is one of the official languages of the Government of India (alongside English), while Nepali is the sole official language of Nepal as well as an official language of the Indian state of Sikkim.

Collectively, Devanagari is the most widely used Brahmic script in the world, with many millions of people using it to read and write text on a daily basis.Ī map of 22 official languages of India as defined by The Eighth Schedule to the Constitution of India. Today, the Devanagari script is used to write three major languages: Hindi (over 520 million speakers), Marathi (over 83 million speakers) and Nepali (over 14 million speakers). Manuscripts, written with reed pens, were the primary medium of Devanagari writing.

Before the spread of print, Devanagari was almost exclusively used for formal texts, composed by scribes.

In fact, Devanagari was generally preferred for non-scribal purposes, since local cursive scripts were better suited to the task of writing large volumes of text by hand swiftly. For example, the cursive Moḍī script was used for scribal Marathi, as opposed to Devanagari, used for Marathi inscriptions. It reached maturity around the 13th century CE.Īlthough primarily used to write Sanskrit in inscriptions and religious manuscripts, Devanagari was also used to write vernacular languages across much of northern, northwestern and western India.Īs was customary in pre-modern India, these written traditions utilised more than one script. The Devanagari script (also called Nagari) emerged in the 7th century CE as a descendant of the Gupta script, alongside the closely related ancient Śāradā and Siddhamātr̥kā scripts.

Nepal bhasa type calligraphy font