Hindi · Pronunciation Guide

How do you pronounce "यह" in Hindi?

Q: How do you pronounce यह in Hindi?

यह is pronounced with the stress described below. In IPA it is written /jɛɦ/. It means “this.” Roughly "yeh" as in the vowel of "yes," with a soft voiced h — many speakers barely release it, giving something close to "ye."

Roughly "yeh" as in the vowel of "yes," with a soft voiced h — many speakers barely release it, giving something close to "ye."

यह /jɛɦ/

yeh

A short, light syllable that in connected speech leans forward onto the noun it introduces — yeh kitaab moves as one phrase with the beat on the noun. Overweighting yeh makes it sound contrastive, as if you were pointing something out in opposition.

Listen: यह

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Sound it out

y A palatal glide, same as English y in "yes."

e An open-mid front vowel here, lower than the long ए of se or ke; the spelling यह is pronounced with this lowered quality by most speakers.

h Voiced ह, often weakened to almost nothing in fast speech. Do not give it the hard breathy release English gives a final h in isolation.

Hear it in a sentence

यह किताब दिलचस्प है।

Yeh kitaab dilchasp hai.

This book is interesting.

Listen: यह किताब दिलचस्प है।

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"Yeh kitaab dilchasp hai" leaves the demonstrative unmarked for number and gender, which is why the same yeh serves for "this" and "these." Dilchasp, a Persian compound, ends in an unaspirated p that should stay quiet before hai.

Where English speakers slip

Learners either give the word a full English "yay" with an offglide, or pronounce a hard final h as in "eh?" The realistic target is a lowered short vowel with the h soft enough that it mostly just adds a breathy tail — and crucially not a diphthong.