The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless

romanisation Romanization or romanisation, in linguistics, is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and ...

of Indic scripts as employed by

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that emerged during the nineteenth century from suggestions by Charles Trevelyan, William Jones,

Monier Monier-Williams Sir Monier Monier-Williams (; né Williams; 12 November 1819 – 11 April 1899) was a British scholar who was the second Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University, England. He studied, documented and taught Asian languages, especiall ...

and other scholars, and formalised by the Transliteration Committee of the Geneva Oriental Congress, in September 1894. IAST makes it possible for the reader to read the Indic text unambiguously, exactly as if it were in the original Indic script. It is this faithfulness to the original scripts that accounts for its continuing popularity amongst scholars.

Usage

Scholars commonly use IAST in publications that cite textual material in Sanskrit,

Pāḷi Pali () is a Middle Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is widely studied because it is the language of the Buddhist ''Pāli Canon'' or '' Tipiṭaka'' as well as the sacred language of ''Theravāda'' Buddhis ...

and other classical Indian languages. IAST is also used for major e-text repositories such as SARIT, Muktabodha, GRETIL, and sanskritdocuments.org. The IAST scheme represents more than a century of scholarly usage in books and journals on classical Indian studies. By contrast, the ISO 15919 standard for transliterating Indic scripts emerged in 2001 from the standards and library worlds. For the most part, ISO 15919 follows the IAST scheme, departing from it only in minor ways (e.g., ṃ/ṁ and ṛ/r̥)—see comparison below. The Indian

National Library at Kolkata romanization The National Library at Kolkata romanisationSee p 24-26 for table comparing Indic languages, and p 33-34 for Devanagari alphabet listing. is a widely used transliteration scheme in dictionaries and grammars of Indic languages. This transliter ...

, intended for the romanisation of all Indic scripts, is an extension of IAST.

Inventory and conventions

The IAST letters are listed with their

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; , , Sanskrit pronunciation: ), also called Nagari (),Kathleen Kuiper (2010), The Culture of India, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, , page 83 is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental writing system), based on the ...

equivalents and phonetic values in IPA, valid for

Hindi Hindi ( Devanāgarī: or , ), or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi (Devanagari: ), is an Indo-Aryan language spoken chiefly in the Hindi Belt region encompassing parts of northern, central, eastern, and western India. Hindi has been ...

and other modern languages that use Devanagari script, but some phonological changes have occurred: Some letters are modified with diacritics: Long vowels are marked with an overline. Vocalic (syllabic) consonants, retroflexes and ṣ () have an underdot. One letter has an overdot: ṅ (). One has an acute accent: ś (). Unlike

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

-only romanizations such as

ITRANS The "Indian languages TRANSliteration" (ITRANS) is an ASCII transliteration scheme for Indic scripts, particularly for the Devanagari script. The need for a simple encoding scheme that used only keys available on an ordinary keyboard was felt i ...

Harvard-Kyoto The Harvard-Kyoto Convention is a system for transliterating Sanskrit and other languages that use the Devanāgarī script into ASCII. It is predominantly used informally in e-mail, and for electronic texts. Harvard-Kyoto system Prior to the ...

, the diacritics used for IAST allow capitalization of proper names. The capital variants of letters never occurring word-initially () are useful only when writing in all-caps and in Pāṇini contexts for which the convention is to typeset the '' IT'' sounds as capital letters.

Comparison with ISO 15919

For the most part, IAST is a subset of ISO 15919 that merges the retroflex (underdotted) liquids with the vocalic ones ( ringed below) and the short close-mid vowels with the long ones. The following seven exceptions are from the ISO standard accommodating an extended repertoire of symbols to allow transliteration of Devanāgarī and other Indic scripts, as used for languages other than Sanskrit.

Computer input by alternative keyboard layout

The most convenient method of inputting romanized Sanskrit is by setting up an alternative

keyboard layout A keyboard layout is any specific physical, visual or functional arrangement of the keys, legends, or key-meaning associations (respectively) of a computer keyboard, mobile phone, or other computer-controlled typographic keyboard. is the actua ...

. This allows one to hold a modifier key to type letters with diacritical marks. For example, = ā. How this is set up varies by operating system. Linux/Unix and BSD desktop environments allow one to set up custom keyboard layouts and switch them by clicking a flag icon in the menu bar.

macOS macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...

One can use the pre-installed US International keyboard, or install Toshiya Unebe's Easy Unicode keyboard layout. Microsoft Windows Windows also allows one to change keyboard layouts and set up additional custom keyboard mappings for IAST. This Pali keyboard installer made by Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC) supports IAST (works on Microsoft Windows up to at least version 10, can use Alt button on the right side of the keyboard instead of Ctrl+Alt combination).

Computer input by selection from a screen

Many systems provide a way to select Unicode characters visually. ISO/IEC 14755 refers to this as a ''screen-selection entry method''. Microsoft Windows has provided a Unicode version of the Character Map program (find it by hitting then type charmap then hit ) since version NT 4.0 – appearing in the consumer edition since XP. This is limited to characters in the

Basic Multilingual Plane In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecima ...

(BMP). Characters are searchable by Unicode character name, and the table can be limited to a particular code block. More advanced third-party tools of the same type are also available (a notable

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for t ...

example is BabelMap).

provides a "character palette" with much the same functionality, along with searching by related characters, glyph tables in a font, etc. It can b
enabled
in the input menu in the menu bar under System Preferences → International → Input Menu (or System Preferences → Language and Text → Input Sources) or can be viewed under Edit → Emoji & Symbols in many programs. Equivalent tools – such as

gucharmap GNOME Character Map, formerly known as Gucharmap, is a free and open-source software Unicode character map program, part of GNOME. This program allows characters to be displayed by Unicode block or script type. It includes brief descriptions of re ...

( GNOME) or kcharselect ( KDE) – exist on most Linux desktop environments. Users of SCIM on Linux based platforms can also have the opportunity to install and use the sa-itrans-iast input handler which provides complete support for the ISO 15919 standard for the romanization of Indic languages as part of the m17n library.

Font support

Only certain fonts support all the Latin

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

characters essential for the transliteration of Indic scripts according to the ISO 15919 standard. For example, the Arial, Tahoma and

Times New Roman Times New Roman is a serif typeface. It was commissioned by the British newspaper ''The Times'' in 1931 and conceived by Stanley Morison, the artistic adviser to the British branch of the printing equipment company Monotype, in collaboration w ...

font packages that come with

Microsoft Office 2007 Microsoft Office 2007 (codenamed Office 12) is an office suite for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was officially revealed on March 9, 2006 and was the 12th version of Microsoft Office. It was released to manufacturing on Novem ...

and later versions also support precomposed Unicode characters like ''ā, ḍ, ḥ, ī, ḷ, ḹ, ṃ, ñ, ṅ, ṇ, ṛ, ṝ, ṣ, ś, ṭ'' and ''ū,'' glyphs for some of which are only to be found in the

Latin Extended Additional Latin Extended Additional is a Unicode block. The characters in this block are mostly precomposed combinations of Latin letters with one or more general diacritical marks. Ninety of the characters are used in the Vietnamese alphabet. There are a ...

Unicode block. The majority of other text fonts commonly used for book production are defective in their support for one or more characters from this block. Accordingly, many academics working in the area of Sanskrit studies now make use of free and open-source software like

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite co ...

, instead of

Microsoft Word Microsoft Word is a word processor, word processing software developed by Microsoft. It was first released on October 25, 1983, under the name ''Multi-Tool Word'' for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other pla ...

, in conjunction with free OpenType fonts like FreeSerif or Gentium, both of which have complete support for the full repertoire of conjoined diacritics in the IAST character set. Released under the

GNU FreeFont GNU FreeFont (also known as Free UCS Outline Fonts) is a family of free OpenType, TrueType and WOFF vector fonts, implementing as much of the Universal Character Set (UCS) as possible, aside from the very large CJK Asian character set. The p ...

or SIL Open Font License, respectively, such fonts may be freely shared and do not require the person reading or editing a document to purchase proprietary software to make use of its associated fonts.

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:International Alphabet Of Sanskrit Transliteration Hindustani orthography Romanization of Brahmic Sanskrit transliteration Encodings