How to read our Hinglish

Devanagari, as spoken

The Devanagari line records what the speaker actually says, not a tidied or textbook version. If a character drops a sound, slips in an English word or uses a dotted consonant, the Devanagari follows the audio. Two people check it, each against a legal copy of the film: the transcriber and our native reviewer.

The dot written under some consonants is called the nukta. In Unicode, ज़ is named DEVANAGARI LETTER ZA and is defined as ज followed by the nukta sign. फ़ (FA), क़ (QA), ख़ (KHHA), ग़ (GHHA), ड़ (DDDHA) and ढ़ (RHA) are built the same way, and the Unicode Standard places the nukta immediately after the consonant it modifies. We write the nukta when the speaker pronounces the dotted sound and leave it out when they do not, even if a dictionary spells the word the other way.

Behind the scenes every line is stored in one Unicode normal form, so a dotted letter matches itself however it was typed.

Source: Unicode Consortium [1] · Unicode Consortium [2], checked 26 October 2026.

Hinglish, for reading aloud

The table shows how each sound is written. Example words are everyday vocabulary, not film lines.

• Capital letters are used only for names and for the first word of a line.
• Where two Hindi sounds share one Hinglish spelling, the Devanagari line above it keeps the distinction.

English words inside a Hindi line

Hindi film dialogue often borrows English words. In the Hinglish we spell them the standard English way, so a borrowed "doctor" stays doctor. In the Devanagari we write them as the speaker says them. For the open "o" of many English words we use the candra o sign ॉ, which Unicode names DEVANAGARI VOWEL SIGN CANDRA O, as in डॉक्टर.

If a line is mainly in another language or dialect, such as Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Bambaiya or Haryanvi, we leave it out unless our reviewer is fluent in it. We would rather skip a good line than misrecord it.

Source: Unicode Consortium [1], checked 26 October 2026.

Our translation

The English meaning is ours. We write it from the Hindi, never from a film's subtitles, and we aim for what the line means in its scene rather than a word-for-word gloss. Where a word carries a shade English cannot hold, such as a form of respect or a regional idiom, the entry's translation note explains the choice instead of forcing it into the translation itself.

A translation is still a version of the line, so we hold it to the same rules as the original: it appears once, on the entry's own page, and nowhere else on the site.

Reading tips

• Read the Hinglish aloud at normal speed. The scheme is written for the ear.
• Doubled vowels are long: aa roughly as in "father", ee as in "see", oo as in "food".
• If two words look identical in Hinglish, check the Devanagari line; it keeps every distinction.
• Spot a mistake? Tell us on the contact page. Wording reports are re-checked against the legal copy within 48 hours.