Section Two - Punctuation

Hindi does not have any particular forms of punctuation that an English-speaker might find odd.

1. Full stops: Full stops are written as “।” and are used at the end of a sentence.

2. Speech marks: "..." (direct speech) is used for conversation and '...' is used for highlighting a noun. E.g.:

1. “Give me more work!”, shouted Chloe.

2. “Would anyone like some tea?” asked George.

3. “I’m bored – can I go home now?”, Michala said.

3. Colons, semi-colons and ellipsis: These are used in the same way as in English.

4. Apostrophe: Apostrophes are not used in Hindi.

Section Three – Measurements and Abbreviations

1. Measurements: The metric system is mostly used.

For decimals, a full stop '.' is used and, for separating thousands, a comma ',' is used.

The following shows how different times are written in Hindi:

10.30 am / noon / 4.30 pm / midnight

The following shows the different ways in which the date can be formatted:

Spacing: There should be a space between a figure and all measurement abbreviations, except for °C, which would be: 30 °C.

2. Abbreviations:

Days of the week: Mon, Tues, Wed, Thurs, Fri, Sat, Sun

Months: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec

Seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter (not normally abbreviated in English)

Section Four - Hyphenation

Hyphens are used when a word remains incomplete at the end of a line while writing or when specifying a range, e.g.: 2-3

Hindi has both prefixes and suffixes which are joined to words with a hyphen,
e.g.:

There are no particular characters/combinations of characters that can not be separated by a hyphen.

Section Five - Miscellaneous Peculiarities

Naming: Capitalisation does not apply in Hindi. Therefore, surnames will never be capitalised, as in some other languages.

However, surnames may be written before the first name in specific cases.

Section Six - Geographic Distribution

Hindi is a language spoken in most states in northern and central India. It is an Indo-European language, of the Indo-Aryan subfamily. It evolved from the Middle Indo-Aryan prakrit languages of the Middle Ages, and indirectly, from Sanskrit. Hindi derives much of its formal and technical vocabulary from Sanskrit. Due to Muslim influence in Northern India, a large number of Persian, Arabic and Turkish words were adopted, which eventually resulted in the formation of Urdu. Standard or "pure" Hindi is used only in public addresses and radio or TV news, while the everyday spoken language in most areas is one of several varieties of Hindustani. This fact can be observed in North Indian (e.g. 'Bollywood') films.

Hindi became the official language of India on January 26, 1965, and there are 14 other official languages: Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit. There are approximately 1650 dialects spoken across India.

English enjoys associate status but is the most important language for national, political, and commercial communication.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindi (accessed 20th June 2005)

Section Seven - Character Set

[ ] = Alt key codes

A sample of some of the characters in Hindi would be: