MT WorldType Devanagari

Known to be the most frequently utilized of the Northern Indic scripts, Devanagari is used to write Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Kashmiri, Bihari, Rajasthani, as well as some minority languages. Nowadays, it is also the script most commonly used for writing Sanskrit which is the ancient predecessor of Modern Hindi. All modern-day Indic scripts are descendants of Brahmi, an extinct script which flourished more than two thousand years ago. Over the centuries, the offshoots of Brahmi branched into two broad groups: one for writing the northern Indic, mainly Indo-Aryan languages, the other for the southern Indic, Dravidian languages.

As an exemplary descendant of Brahmi script, Devanagari embodies all the features which typify the 'Brahmi model':