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 upon in 2001 by a network of the national standards institutes of 157 countries.
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
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
anusvÄra as
, while
ALA-LC and
IAST use
for it.
Comparison with UNRSGN and IAST
The table below shows the differences between ISO 15919, UNRSGN and IAST for
Devanagari transliteration.
See also
