The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a standardized system that allows lossless romanization of Indic scripts used in Sanskrit and related languages. IAST represents the phonemes of Sanskrit and allows phonetic transcription. It is based on a standard established in 1894 and allows capitalization for proper names. IAST is mostly consistent with the more comprehensive ISO 15919 standard for transliterating Indic scripts, with a few minor differences in representing certain letters.
The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a standardized system that allows lossless romanization of Indic scripts used in Sanskrit and related languages. IAST represents the phonemes of Sanskrit and allows phonetic transcription. It is based on a standard established in 1894 and allows capitalization for proper names. IAST is mostly consistent with the more comprehensive ISO 15919 standard for transliterating Indic scripts, with a few minor differences in representing certain letters.
The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a standardized system that allows lossless romanization of Indic scripts used in Sanskrit and related languages. IAST represents the phonemes of Sanskrit and allows phonetic transcription. It is based on a standard established in 1894 and allows capitalization for proper names. IAST is mostly consistent with the more comprehensive ISO 15919 standard for transliterating Indic scripts, with a few minor differences in representing certain letters.
International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration
The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (I.A.S.T.) is a transliteration scheme
that allows a lossless romanization of Indic scripts as employed by the Sanskrit language. It is also used to romanize Pi, Prkta and Apabhraa. Use IAST is especially used for books dealing with ancient Sanskrit and Pi topics related to Indian religions. The script is, however, insufficient to represent both Sanskrit and Pi on the same page properly because the (l with underdot), a vowel in Sanskrit (vocalic /l/), is the retroflex consonant in Pi ([]). Here it is better to follow Unicode and ISO 15919, which is in any case a more comprehensive scheme. IAST is based on a standard established by the International Congress of Orientalists at Geneva in 1894. [1][2] It allows a lossless transliteration of Devangar (and other Indic scripts, such as rad script); and, as such, it represents not only the phonemes of Sanskrit, but allows essentially phonetic transcription, e.g., visarga is an allophone of word-final r and s. The National Library at Kolkata romanization, intended for the romanization of all Indic scripts, is an extension of IAST. Inventory and conventions The IAST letters are listed with their Devangar equivalents and phonetic values in IPA, valid for Sanskrit, Hindi and other modern languages that use Devanagari script. Some phonological changes have occurred. Vowels and codas Devangar Transcription Category a A monophthongs & syllabic liquids
i I
u U
e E diphthongs ai Ai o O au Au anusvara visarga '
avagraha Consonants velars palatals retroflexes dentals labial s
k K
c C
t T
p P tenuis stops
kh Kh
ch Ch
h h
th Th
ph Ph aspirated stops
g G
j J
d D
b B voiced stops
gh Gh
jh Jh
h h
dh Dh
bh Bh breathy-voiced stops
n N
m M nasal stops
h H
y Y
r R
l L
v V approximants
s S sibilants The highlighted letters are those modified with diacritics, e.g., long vowels are marked with an over-line, vocalic (syallabic) consonants and retroflexes have an under-dot. Unlike ASCII-only romanizations such as ITRANS or Harvard-Kyoto, the diacritics used for IAST allow capitalization of proper names. The capital variants of letters which never occur word-initially ( ) are useful only in Pini contexts, where 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. The following five exceptions are due to the ISO standard accommodating an extended repertoire of symbols to allow transliteration of Devangar and other Indic scripts as used for languages other than Sanskrit. Devangar IAST ISO 15919 Comment / e ISO e represents / . / o ISO o represents /.
ISO represents Gurmukhi tippi . / r ISO represents //. / r for consistency with .