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Hindi grammar wheels

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Grammar Wheels

"I gave my three books to her at the market." — Change any wheels to see how Hindi encodes each shift.

Common questions about Hindi

What can I toggle on the Hindi wheel?
Subject (person, number, and gender, since Hindi marks gender on the verb), tense (past, present, future), aspect (simple, progressive, perfect), mood (declarative, question, command, subjunctive), polarity, and the तू / तुम / आप register dial. Each spin rebuilds the verb form in Devanagari with a transliteration.
Why does flipping subject gender change the verb?
Hindi verbs agree with the subject's gender as well as person and number. Switching the speaker from masculine to feminine takes बोलता to बोलती — same root, different ending.
What happens in the transitive past?
The wheel surfaces Hindi's split-ergative pattern: in transitive past, the subject takes ने and the verb agrees with the object instead. Intransitive past keeps normal subject agreement, so toggling transitivity makes the contrast visible.
How do the three register levels work?
तू (intimate or junior), तुम (peers and family), and आप (formal or respectful) each take a distinct verb ending. Switching the register dial shifts both the pronoun and the inflection on the verb.
Can I use the wheel without reading Devanagari?
Each generated sentence shows Devanagari, a transliteration, a word-by-word gloss, and an English translation. You can pick up the script naturally as the same characters reappear under each spin.

Sources for Hindi

The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.

  1. Kachru, Yamuna (2006). Hindi. Amsterdam: John Benjamins (London Oriental and African Language Library 12).
  2. Shapiro, Michael C. (2003). Hindi. In G. Cardona & D. Jain (eds.), The Indo-Aryan Languages, pp. 250–285. London: Routledge.
  3. McGregor, R. S. (1995). Outline of Hindi Grammar, 3rd ed. Oxford University Press.
  4. Snell, Rupert & Weightman, Simon (2003). Teach Yourself Hindi, 4th ed. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
  5. Mohanan, Tara (1994). Argument Structure in Hindi. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.

See all data sources and dataset-level citations for the broader bibliography.

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