There are several

romanisation In linguistics, romanization 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 transcription, ...

schemes for the

Malayalam script Malayalam script (; / ) is a Brahmic scripts, Brahmic script used to write Malayalam, the principal language of Kerala, India, spoken by 45 million people. It is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union ter ...

, including ITRANS and

ISO 15919 ISO 15919 is an international standard for the romanization of Indic scripts. Published in 2001, it is part of a series of romanization standards by the International Organization for Standardization. Overview Relation to other systems ...

ASCII schemes

Typesetting Malayalam on computers became an issue with their spread in the late 20th century. The lack of diacritics on keyboards led to the adoption of

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

only romanisation schemes. ASCII only schemes remain popular in email correspondence and input methods because of their ease of entry. These schemes are also called Manglish. The disadvantage of ASCII schemes is that letter case is meaningful, so that transliterated names may not be capitalised.

Mozhi

The Mozhi system of transliteration is an unofficial system used to transliterate

Malayalam Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian languages, Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry (union territory), Puducherry (Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of ...

, it can also be used for

Tamil Tamil may refer to: People, culture and language * Tamils, an ethno-linguistic group native to India, Sri Lanka, and some other parts of Asia **Sri Lankan Tamils, Tamil people native to Sri Lanka ** Myanmar or Burmese Tamils, Tamil people of Ind ...

. This system does not need the use of diacritics. Even though it has more elaborate scheme, MozhiMozhi transliteration scheme
/ref> is as follows: aa i ii u uu R RR e E ai o O au Ll Lll am aH k kh g gh ng ch chh j jh nj T Th D Dh N th thh d dh n p ph b bh m y r l v S sh s h L zh rr t

ITRANS

ITRANS is an ASCII scheme which does not use diacritics for transliteration to Latin script.

National Library at Kolkata romanisation

The " National Library at Kolkata romanisation" is one of the most widely used

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 ...

schemes in dictionaries and grammars of

Indo-Aryan languages The Indo-Aryan languages, or sometimes Indic languages, are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages in the Indo-European languages, Indo-European language family. As of 2024, there are more than 1.5 billion speakers, primarily concentrated east ...

and

Dravidian languages The Dravidian languages are a language family, family of languages spoken by 250 million people, primarily in South India, north-east Sri Lanka, and south-west Pakistan, with pockets elsewhere in South Asia. The most commonly spoken Dravidian l ...

including Malayalam. This transliteration scheme is also known as '(American) Library of Congress' scheme and is nearly identical to one of the possible

variants. The scheme is an extension of the

IAST The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Brahmic family, Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that ...

scheme that is used for transliteration of

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; stem form ; nominal singular , ,) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in northwest South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural ...

ISO 15919

"Transliteration of Devanagari and related Indic scripts into Latin characters" is one of a series of international standards for

. It was published in 2001 and uses

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

s to map the much larger set of consonants and vowels in

Brahmic scripts The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India and are used b ...

to the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

References

Malayalam script

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