Months in Hindi: Gregorian and Hindu calendar months, IAST and IPA

English and Portuguese: where the Hindi month names come from

Hindi has no native names for January to December. The Gregorian calendar arrived with European traders and administrators, and the names came with it. Most of the months in Hindi were taken from English, and जुलाई (julāī) and अप्रैल (aprail) still sound close to July and April. Four of them are older: Wiktionary traces अगस्त, सितंबर, अक्टूबर and दिसंबर to Portuguese agosto, setembro, outubro and dezembro, later adjusted towards the English forms. Spanish, Italian and Russian names of those months descend from the same Latin words, so the family likeness runs across the months in many languages table.

A borrowed word still has to fit Hindi sounds. February needs the sound f, which Hindi writes with a dot under the letter ph: फ़. Without that nuqta the word reads pharvarī, and Wiktionary records that pronunciation too. The ending -bar of the autumn months is written with the nasal sign anusvāra in सितंबर, नवंबर and दिसंबर, a dot above the line that stands for the m sound before b.

Gender, spelling and short forms of the months in Hindi

Hindi gives every noun a gender, and the months split along their endings. Names ending in -ī are feminine: जनवरी, फ़रवरी, मई and जुलाई. The other eight are masculine. The difference shows in agreement: जनवरी आ गई (January has come) uses the feminine verb ending, मार्च आ गया the masculine one.

Short forms in Hindi cut the word and add the Devanagari abbreviation sign ॰, a small circle: जन॰, फ़र॰, अग॰, सित॰, नव॰, दिस॰. Short names are not shortened, so मार्च, अप्रैल, मई and जून stand in full even in compact date formats. These are the sets that the Unicode CLDR data ships to phones and computers set to Hindi.

Devanagari has no capital letters, so months are never capitalised. The common spelling errors are phonetic. मे for May leaves out the second vowel of मई; अकटूबर without the conjunct क्ट misses the sound cluster of akṭūbar. Both forms appear in older word lists, while dictionaries and CLDR use मई and अक्टूबर.

Writing dates with the months in Hindi

A Hindi date runs day, month, year, with no word between them: 28 अक्टूबर 2026. The weekday goes in front with a comma, बुधवार, 28 अक्टूबर 2026, which is the long date pattern in CLDR for Hindi. Numerals may be written with the international digits 0 to 9 or with Devanagari digits, २८ अक्टूबर २०२६; the numbers in Hindi page has both sets.

In speech and in sentences about time the postposition में (in) follows the month: मई में बहुत गर्मी होती है, it is very hot in May. For a specific day the date takes को, the same postposition used with weekdays: 15 अगस्त को, on 15 August. Spoken aloud, the number before the month is read as a Hindi numeral: पंद्रह अगस्त, pandrah agast.

Hindu months and the Indian national calendar

The everyday forms tell the history. जेठ, सावन, भादों and फागुन came down through Prakrit and are inherited words that changed with the sound of the language; सावन in particular also means the monsoon season itself, July to August. The learned forms ज्येष्ठ, श्रावण, भाद्रपद and फाल्गुन were borrowed back from Sanskrit in their old shape, so one month can have two names, much as English has both kingly and royal.

India also has a solar civil calendar with the same month names. The Indian national calendar, adopted on 22 March 1957 (1 Chaitra 1879 of the Saka era), starts its year with Chaitra on 22 March, or on 21 March in a leap year, and fixes every other month to a Gregorian date. Wikipedia's article on the calendar notes that panchang makers and the general public never took it up and that its use is largely limited to government offices; the older calendars stay in use beside it.