How to pronounce Sanskrit yoga words

Why the little marks matter

Yoga words reach us in two spellings. Studios write shavasana; scholars write śavāsana. The second form is IAST, the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration, based on the system adopted by the Congress of Orientalists in Geneva in 1894. Every sign in it stands for one Sanskrit letter, so it tells you exactly how to say the word. The marks are not decoration: a bar makes a vowel long, a dot under a letter changes where the tongue goes, and ś and ṣ are two different sounds.

The good news: Sanskrit is spoken as it is written. Once you know the sounds below, you can read any word on this site aloud.

The vowels: length is meaning

Arthur Macdonell's Sanskrit Grammar for Students (1927) gives the rule in one line: the vowels are pronounced as in Italian, except the short a, which "has rather the sound of the so-called neutral vowel in English, like the u in 'but'".

Macdonell adds that e and o have been pronounced as simple long vowels "since at least 300 B.C.", which is why yoga is never "yo-ugh-a": it is a pure, long o. The Indian grammarians, Whitney notes, define a long vowel as twice the length of a short one (§ 77), and length changes the word: mālā is a garland or rosary, mala an impurity.

The consonants: five places in the mouth

Sanskrit grammarians ordered the consonants by where the mouth closes, from the throat to the lips. Each row has the same five kinds of sound.

Then come य y, र r, ल l, व v, the three sibilants श ś, ष ṣ, स s, and ह h.

What each column means, in Macdonell's words and examples:

• Aspirated consonants: "the aspiration of the consonants should be heard distinctly": kh as in "ink-horn", th as in "pot-house", ph as in "top-heavy", gh as in "loghouse", dh as in "madhouse", bh as in "Hobhouse". So haṭha is not "hatha" with the th of "think", and phala is not "fala".
• c and j "have the sound of ch in 'church' and of j in 'join'". Cakra is said chakra, never "shakra" or "kakra".
• ṅ has "the sound of ng in 'king'".
• Retroflex ṭ, ḍ, ṇ are like English t, d, n, "the tongue being, however, turned rather further back against the roof of the mouth". You hear them in haṭha, prāṇa, kuṇḍalinī.
• Dental t, d, n are said today with the tip of the tongue "against the very edge of the front teeth", softer than English t and d.

Three hissing sounds: s, ś, ṣ

Macdonell again: s "sounds like s in 'sin'", ṣ "like sh in 'shun'", while ś is "midway between the two", like the sound in German ich. In practice, for an English speaker, both ś and ṣ are close to sh: śānti (SHAAN-ti), śiva, ṛṣi. Just never say them as a plain s.

Anusvāra (ṃ) and visarga (ḥ)

• ṃ, the anusvāra, is a nasal sound "like n in the French 'bon'", without the tongue closing: saṃskṛta, ahiṃsā, oṃ. Before a consonant it often sounds like the nasal of that consonant's row.
• ḥ, the visarga, is a breath at the end of a word, "in India generally pronounced as a hard h, followed by a short echo of the preceding vowel". So namaḥ is said na-ma-ha, and duḥkha has a light breath in the middle.

Stress: light, and predictable

The oldest Sanskrit, that of the Vedas, had a musical accent: William Dwight Whitney's Sanskrit Grammar (1879, §§ 80-82) explains that the Indian grammarians describe it as a matter of pitch, with a raised tone (udātta), a lower one (anudātta) and a falling compound one (svarita). Trained Vedic reciters still keep it. Classical Sanskrit, the language of the Gītā and of the yoga texts, has no written accent. According to Macdonell, since about the beginning of our era it has been said with a stress accent much like Latin:

1. on the second-to-last syllable if it is long: Kālidāsa, stressed on dā;
2. otherwise on the third-to-last: Himālaya, stressed on mā;
3. and if the last two before the end are both short, on the fourth from the end: kārayati, stressed on kā.

A syllable is long if it has a long vowel, ṃ or ḥ, or ends in a consonant (as man in mantra). Keep the stress light: in Sanskrit, length matters more than loudness.

Twenty yoga words to say aloud

The capitals mark the light stress given by the rule above; "uh" is the short a of "but", "aa" a long ā.

One more for the road: jñāna, knowledge, is usually said "gyaa-nuh" in North India, hence the Hindi spelling gyan.

How to practise

1. Read a word in IAST, then in Devanāgarī. Our Sanskrit glossary gives 247 yoga words in both.
2. Exaggerate at first: double the long vowels, breathe the aspirates, curl the tongue for ṭ and ḍ. You will relax into the right measure.
3. Read a verse aloud every day: start with the sutras of the Yoga Sutras page or the Gayatri mantra.
4. Listen to people who learned from a teacher: Vedic chanting in India is passed on by ear, and the ear corrects what the eye misses.

Our book

Sanskrit for Yogis gives the complete Devanāgarī tables, a pronunciation key written for English speakers, the basic sandhi rules, how to read the name of any āsana, and eleven mantras word by word, from the Gāyatrī to oṃ saha nāvavatu.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Arthur A. Macdonell, A Sanskrit Grammar for Students, 3rd edition (Oxford, 1927), § 15 Pronunciation, Internet Archive checked October 17, 2026
2. William Dwight Whitney, A Sanskrit Grammar (Leipzig, 1879), §§ 77 and 80-82 on quantity and accent, Internet Archive checked October 17, 2026
3. Royal Asiatic Society, Transliteration Report (1896), on the system adopted at the Geneva Congress of Orientalists (1894), Internet Archive checked October 17, 2026
4. International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration, Wikipedia checked October 17, 2026
5. Monier-Williams, Sanskrit-English Dictionary (1899), entry āyāma, Cologne Digital Sanskrit Dictionaries checked October 17, 2026

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