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Hindi Bible in English letters: what Hinglish is and how to read the Bible with it

यीशु वचन (Yeshu Vachan) · Updated 2026-10-02

Who Hinglish reading is for

Many families have someone who understands every word of a Hindi sermon but stumbles over the printed Bible: children who went to English-medium schools, people who grew up in South India, the Northeast or abroad, Punjabi and other North-Indian believers who read Roman letters more easily than Devanagari. They already know the language. What they lack is the script, and Hinglish removes that one barrier.

How the app produces Hinglish

The app does not carry a second, romanised copy of the Bible. It converts the Hindi text on your phone, verse by verse, as you read. The conversion follows the everyday spelling people use when texting, not the academic ISO 15919 system with its diacritics, because that is the spelling people already read fluently.

A few conventions make it read naturally:

• The unspoken “a” is dropped, as in speech: at the end of a word (वचन vachan, जीवन jeevan) and between two consonants that each carry a vowel (अपना apna, परमेश्वर Parmeshwar).
• Vowel length the way people text it: ई and ऊ are “ee” and “oo” inside a word (jeevan) and “i”, “u” at the end (Yeshu); the ा vowel sign is “aa” only in a word’s last, closed syllable (नाम naam) and “a” elsewhere.
• व after श, स or द is “w” (Parmeshwar, स्वर्ग swarg); elsewhere it is “v”.
• Familiar names are spelled the way everyone writes them: Yeshu, Masih, Prabhu, Yahowa.

Three ways to read a chapter

At the top of every chapter there is a switch with three positions:

1. Hindi: Devanagari only.
2. Hinglish: English letters only.
3. Hindi + Hinglish: each verse in Hindi with its Hinglish line directly beneath. Reading this way for a few weeks is the easiest route to learning Devanagari, because you always know what the letters are saying.

The choice is remembered. On first launch the app asks whether you want Hindi or Hinglish as your main mode, and you can switch from the Today screen any time. In Hinglish mode the verse of the day, its WhatsApp share card, search results and saved verses all appear in Hinglish, and the menus and book names switch to English, so the whole app can be used without reading Devanagari.

Searching in Hinglish

Type the way you text: yeshu ne kaha finds the verses that say “यीशु ने कहा”. Search treats i/ee, u/oo, s/sh and v/w as the same, and does not mind whether you write the in-between “a”. References work any way you type them: “यूहन्ना 3:16”, “John 3:16” or “yuhanna 3 16”.

On the website too

You do not need the app to read Hinglish: every chapter is on this website, each verse in Hindi with the same verse in Hinglish underneath, for example John 3.

What Hinglish is not

Hinglish is a change of letters, not a translation. The words are still the Hindi O.V. Bible, word for word; only the alphabet changes, so you still need to understand spoken Hindi. (“Hinglish” can also mean Hindi mixed with English words; that is not what happens here, and no English is added.) It is generated by rules, so an occasional word may be spelled a little differently from how you would type it yourself. The meaning is never affected.