ISO 15919 Transliteration of Devanagari and related Indic scripts into Latin characters is an international standard for the transliteration of Indic scripts to the Latin alphabet formed in 2001. It uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic consonants and vowels to the Latin script.

ISO 15919 and other systems

ISO 15919 is an international standard on the romanization of many Indic scripts, which was agreed in 2001 by a network of the national standards institutes of 157 countries.^[1] United Nations Romanization Systems for Geographical Names (UNRSGN) is a standard developed by the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN)^[2] and covers many Indic scripts.

ALA-LC was approved by the Library of Congress and the American Library Association and is a US standard. IAST is not a standard as no formally approved document exists for it but a convention developed in Europe for the transliteration of Sanskrit rather than that of Indic scripts.

As a notable difference, both international standards, ISO 15919 and UNRSGN transliterate anusvāra as ṁ, while ALA-LC and IAST use ṃ for it.

Comparison with UNRSGN and IAST

The table below shows the differences between ISO 15919, UNRSGN and IAST for Devanagari transliteration.

See also

• List of ISO transliterations
• National Library at Kolkata romanization
• IAST

References

External links

• ISO 15919:2001
• Transliteration of Indic scripts: how to use ISO 15919
• Transliteration of Hindi, Marathi & Nepali
• iso15919.py - An implementation of the Devanāgarī part of ISO 15919 in Python

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