Hindi · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "वह" in Hindi?

Q: How do you pronounce वह in Hindi?

वह is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /ʋoː/. It means “that / he / she (also written वो).” Roughly "voh" with a long o and a very light final h — and the initial consonant sits halfway between English v and w.

Roughly "voh" with a long o and a very light final h — and the initial consonant sits halfway between English v and w.

वह /ʋoː/

voh

The long vowel makes this heavy in isolation, but as a pronoun it usually sits unstressed at the head of a clause. So it is short in the sentence even though the vowel itself is long — a distinction worth keeping straight.

Listen: वह

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Sound it out

v व is a single approximant that can lean toward v or w depending on speaker and region; the lower lip approaches the upper teeth loosely, without the strong friction of English v or the tight rounding of English w.

o Long ओ, steady. Also commonly spelled वो, which reflects how it is actually said.

h The final ह is very weak here and often inaudible; do not give it a hard release.

Hear it in a sentence

वह मेरी सीट है।

Voh meree seeṭ hai.

That is my seat.

Listen: वह मेरी सीट है।

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"Voh meree seeṭ hai" shows voh doing demonstrative duty — "that" rather than "he" or "she" — and meree is feminine to match seeṭ, an English loan that takes a retroflex ट. The gender of the loanword is not obvious from its sound, so the possessive is your only clue.

Where English speakers slip

Learners commit to one extreme, either a hard English "voh" with buzzing friction or a fully rounded "woh." Neither is quite right; the Hindi sound is looser and more neutral than both, and forcing an English v also tends to make the following vowel too short.