Sanskrit

About Sanskrit

Sanskrit (संस्कृत) is one of India’s many recognized languages and the liturgical language of Hinduism. Throughout its history, Sanskrit has been written using many systems, and local scripts continue to be used, but its primary writing system is the Devanagari script. Devanagari is an abugida, and unlike alphabets such as Greek or Latin, is not written with complete vowels. Its 33 consonants are written in full, and vowels are represented with the use of diacritics which modify the consonant letter. Devanagari is written from left to right and does not differentiate letter cases.

Before the development of Devanagari, Sanskrit was written using the ancient Brahmi script. Other scripts like Gupta and later Nagari, based on Brahmi, emerged in the first millennium CE, and Devanagari in its modern form was in use by the 11^th century. Some other scripts, such as Gujarati, were later based on Devanagari. Devanagari is now used not only for writing Sanskrit, but also a variety of other languages, mostly fellow Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi, Marathi and Nepali. As a result, it is one of the most used writing systems in the world today.

The Sanskrit holds great importance in Indian culture, similar to that of Greek and Latin in European culture. Many important works of ancient Indian literature were composed in Sanskrit, and were passed down orally for centuries before being written. The majority of ancient and medieval Hindu scriptures used Sanskrit, as did some texts important to Buddhism and Jainism. Sanskrit has influenced the lexicon of many other languages in India, and through religion has also had an impact on languages in Southeast Asia and beyond. Though Sanskrit is primarily a literary language today, there have been efforts to revive it in vernacular use, and currently there are growing numbers of people in India and Nepal who identify as native speakers of Sanskrit.

Devanagari Fonts

You can download free Devanagari fonts from our free fonts collection. If you want to use Devanagari fonts online without downloading, you can use our text generator below.

The following tool will transform your text into graphics with your selection of fonts, colors, and text effects. You can then save the image or use the EMBED button to get image links.

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