Hindi · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "साफ़" in Hindi?

Q: How do you pronounce साफ़ in Hindi?

साफ़ is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /saːf/. It means “clean.” saaf with a long open aa and a genuine f — the nuqta under फ़ is what makes it f rather than an aspirated p.

saaf with a long open aa and a genuine f — the nuqta under फ़ is what makes it f rather than an aspirated p.

साफ़ /saːf/

saaf

A single heavy syllable, long vowel plus a fricative coda. All its length lives in the vowel, so clipping it to something like "suff" is the fastest way to make the word disappear in a sentence.

Listen: साफ़

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Sound it out

saa Plain s and a long आ; give the vowel the duration of "father," not the clipped one of "sat."

f फ़ with a nuqta is a labiodental fricative — upper teeth on lower lip — borrowed with the word from Persian. Without the dot, फ would be an aspirated p.

Hear it in a sentence

रसोई साफ़ है।

Rasoee saaf hai.

The kitchen is clean.

Listen: रसोई साफ़ है।

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"Rasoee saaf hai" leaves saaf invariant despite rasoee being feminine — one of the many Persian-derived adjectives that never inflect. Rasoee ends in a long ee, so the sentence runs a long ee into a long aa with nothing between them.

Where English speakers slip

Learners who memorised फ as "ph" say "saaph" with an aspirated p, which is a real mispronunciation rather than a variant. Look for the dot. The vowel is the other risk: it must stay fully open and long, not shorten toward the English vowel of "soft."