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Hindi · Pronunciation Guide
How do you pronounce "डॉक्टर" in Hindi?
ḌOK-ṭur — both stops are retroflex, with the tongue tip curled back, even though the word is borrowed from English.
ḍokṭar
English stress preserved inside a nativised shell: the sounds have been converted to retroflexes but the falling rhythm has not changed. A long closed syllable, then a schwa plus a tap.
Listen: डॉक्टर
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Sound it out
Hear it in a sentence
डॉक्टर सुबह मरीज़ों को देखते हैं।
Ḍokṭar subah mareezoṁ ko dekhte haiṁ.
The doctor sees patients in the morning.
Listen: डॉक्टर सुबह मरीज़ों को देखते हैं।
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"Ḍokṭar subah mareezoṁ ko dekhte haiṁ" uses the honorific plural dekhte haiṁ for the doctor, and mareezoṁ has a nuqta ज़ inside a nasalized oblique plural. Subah's final h fades to almost nothing in speech.
Where English speakers slip
The temptation is simply to say the English word, which supplies two alveolar stops and an aspirated k. Hindi has made both t-type consonants retroflex, and that is what identifies the word as Hindi rather than as English inserted into a Hindi sentence.