How many letters are in Sanskrit?

Answer 1

It depends on how you look at it. Sanskrit doesn't strictly have an alphabet all to its own, though Devanāgarī is used most often for it. And strictly speaking, Devanāgarī is an alphasyllabary, not an alphabet.

In Sanskrit it's called a वर्णमाला (varṇamāla) which means "garland of characters":

अ आ इ ई उ ऊ ऋ ॠ ऌ* ॡ* ए ऐ ओ औ

क् ख् ग् घ् ङ्

च् छ् ज् झ् ञ्

ट् ठ् ड् ढ् ण्

त् थ् द् ध् न्

प् फ् ब् भ् म्

य् र् ल् व्

श् ष् स् ह्

Transliterated:

a ā i ī u ū ṛ ṝ ḷ ḹ e ai o au

k kh g gh ṅ

c ch j jh ñ

ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍh ṇ

t th d dh n

p ph b bh m

y r l v

ś ṣ s h

*used very rarely

(Look up IAST to know more about the pronunciations. The Wikipedia article on IAST is good.)

That's 14 base vowels and 33 base consonants. 47 base characters. Now consonants can take on vowels as what are known as diacritics (basically marks in, on, at or around the consonant character), like so:

क् - क का कि की कु कू कृ कृ़ कि़ की़ के कै को कौ

Transliteration:

k - ka kā ki kī ku kū kṛ kṝ kḷ kḹ ke kai ko kau

So for each consonant you have the base form PLUS 14 other forms! So you have 15 total forms for 33 consonants: a staggering 495 letters!

But that's a gross overcomplication. The mātrā marks-the diacritics-always have the same value, and the same diacritic can be attached to various consonants to give the same vowel sounds. कु is ku; पु is pu; नु is nu; वु is vu, and so on.

There's also a couple of extra diacritics that can be added to any letter to give an additional sound, but I don't consider them letters on their own. You have the visarga, : which is used to aspirate the vowels attached to consonants-कः is kuḥ (with a hhhhh sound at the end of the u), कूः and काः are kūḥ and kāḥ respectively, with the ः (ḥ) giving that half-gargling hhhhhhh sound at the end. Then there's the anusvara, represented by a ं dot above (transliterated as ṃ), denoting a flat 'm' sound. किं is kiṃ; कां is (kāṃ), et cetera. There's more but these are the important ones.

Answer 2

There is no such thing as an Indian alphabet. India has dozens of different commonly used native writing systems for its various languages, but none of them qualifies as an alphabet.

Answer 3

Hindi only uses 1 alphabet (in fact, most languages in the world only use 1 alphabet).

Answer 4

Sanskrit only uses 1 alphabet (in fact, most languages in the world only use 1 alphabet).

Answer 5

Hindi is written in the Devanāgarī script (which is not an alphabet, but rather an "abugida"). Devanagari consists of 11 vowels and 33.

Answer 6

There are 52 letters in Sanskrit.