ISO 15919 is an international standard for the

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

of Indic scripts. Published in 2001, it is part of a series of romanization standards by the

International Organization for Standardization The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ; ; ) is an independent, non-governmental, international standard development organization composed of representatives from the national standards organizations of member countries. M ...

Overview

Relation to other systems

ISO 15919 is an international standard for the

of many Brahmic scripts, which was agreed upon in 2001 by a network of the national standards institutes of 157 countries. However, the Hunterian transliteration system is the "national system of romanization in

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

" and a United Nations expert group noted about ISO 15919 that "there is no evidence of the use of the system either in India or in international cartographic products." Another standard, United Nations Romanization Systems for Geographical Names (UNRSGN), was developed by the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) and covers many Brahmic scripts. The

ALA-LC romanization ALA-LC (American Library AssociationLibrary of Congress) is a set of standards for romanization, the representation of text in other writing systems using the Latin script. Applications The system is used to represent bibliographic information by ...

was approved by the

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...

and the

American Library Association The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world. History 19th century ...

and is a US standard. The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is not a standard (as no specification exists for it) but a convention developed in Europe for the

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus '' trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → and → the digraph , Cyrillic → , Armenian → or L ...

of Sanskrit rather than the transcription of Brahmic scripts. As a notable difference, both international standards, ISO 15919 and UNRSGN transliterate anusvara as ṁ, while

ALA-LC ALA-LC (American Library AssociationLibrary of Congress) is a set of standards for romanization, the representation of text in other writing systems using the Latin script. Applications The system is used to represent bibliographic information by ...

and IAST use ṃ for it. However, ISO 15919 provides guidance towards disambiguating between various anusvara situations (such as labial versus dental nasalizations), which is described in the table below.

Comparison with UNRSGN and IAST

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

Devanagari Devanagari ( ; in script: , , ) is an Indic script used in the Indian subcontinent. It is a left-to-right abugida (a type of segmental Writing systems#Segmental systems: alphabets, writing system), based on the ancient ''Brāhmī script, Brā ...

transliteration.

Font support

Only certain

font In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a ''typeface'', defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design. For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni (shown in the figure) includes fonts " Roman" (or "regul ...

s support all Latin

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

characters for the transliteration of Indic scripts according to this standard. For example, Tahoma supports almost all the characters needed.

Arial Arial is a sans-serif typeface in the Sans-serif#Neo-grotesque, neo-grotesque style. Fonts from the Arial family are included with all versions of Microsoft Windows after Windows 3.1, as well as in other Microsoft programs, Apple's macOS, and ma ...

and Times New Roman font packages that come with Microsoft Office 2007 and later also support most Latin Extended Additional characters like ḍ, ḷ, ṛ, ṣ and ṭ. There is no standard keyboard layout for ISO 15919 input but many systems provide a way to select Unicode characters visually. ISO/IEC 14755 refers to this as a '' screen-selection entry method''.

Notes

References

External links

ISO 15919:2001

(archived 18 April 2016)

Aksharamukha Asian Script Converter
Transliterates between about 20 Asian scripts and several romanization standards including ISO 15919
Any indic language to another indic language Transliteration
– SILPA project (archived 22 February 2010)

– Basic Transliteration for users and programmers.
Transliteration standard for Hindi, Marathi & Nepali

iso15919.py
– An implementation of the Devanāgarī part of ISO 15919 in Python (archived 23 January 2010)
Devanagari, Sinhala, Tamil and ISO 15919 transliteration service
(archived 29 July 2010)
Devanāgarī to ISO 15919 (IAST) converter
Online tool for converting Devanagari to IAST (archived 15 July 2011) {{ISO standards Romanization of Brahmic #15919 #15919