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INTERNATIONAL ISO
STANDARD 15919

First edition
2001-10-01

Information and documentation —

Transliteration of Devanagari and related
Indic scripts into Latin characters
Information et documentation — Translittération du Devanagari et des
écritures indiennes liées en caractères latins

Reference number
ISO 15919:2001(E)

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ISO 15919:2001(E)

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ISO 15919:2001(E)

Contents Page

1 Scope ..............................................................................................................................................................1
2 Conformance..................................................................................................................................................1
3 Normative references ....................................................................................................................................1
4 Terms and definitions ...................................................................................................................................2
5 Abbreviated terms .........................................................................................................................................3
6 Characteristics of Indic scripts ....................................................................................................................3
7 Transliteration tables ....................................................................................................................................4
8 Special requirements and recommendations...........................................................................................16
8.1 Special requirements ..................................................................................................................................16
8.2 Recommendations.......................................................................................................................................18
9 Options .........................................................................................................................................................18
10 Tables for uniform transliteration of Indic scripts ...................................................................................19
11 Transliteration scheme for limited character set .....................................................................................19
12 Recommended transliteration of Indic schemes for Perso-Arabic characters.....................................19
13 Additional Indic scripts ...............................................................................................................................19
14 Reverse transliteration................................................................................................................................19
Annex A (normative) Tables for uniform transliteration .......................................................................................20
Annex B (normative) Transliteration table for limited (7-bit) character set ........................................................24
Annex C (normative) Recommended transliteration of Indic schemes for Perso-Arabic characters..............25
Annex D (informative) Examples of Indic characters used for Perso-Arabic .....................................................26
Annex E (informative) Additional Indic scripts ......................................................................................................27
Annex F (informative) Reverse transliteration of Indic scripts.............................................................................28
F.1 Overview .......................................................................................................................................................28
F.2 Examples of reverse transliteration in modern Indic languages............................................................28
F.3 Reverse transliteration in Vedic texts .......................................................................................................28
Bibliography ..............................................................................................................................................................29

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ISO 15919:2001(E)

Foreword
ISO (the International Organization for Standardization) is a worldwide federation of national standards bodies (ISO
member bodies). The work of preparing International Standards is normally carried out through ISO technical
committees. Each member body interested in a subject for which a technical committee has been established has
the right to be represented on that committee. International organizations, governmental and non-governmental, in
liaison with ISO, also take part in the work. ISO collaborates closely with the International Electrotechnical
Commission (IEC) on all matters of electrotechnical standardization.

International Standards are drafted in accordance with the rules given in the ISO/IEC Directives, Part 3.

Draft International Standards adopted by the technical committees are circulated to the member bodies for voting.
Publication as an International Standard requires approval by at least 75 % of the member bodies casting a vote.

Attention is drawn to the possibility that some of the elements of this International Standard may be the subject of
patent rights. ISO shall not be held responsible for identifying any or all such patent rights.

International Standard ISO 15919 was prepared by Technical Committee ISO/TC 46, Information and
documentation, Subcommittee SC 2, Conversion of written languages.

Annexes A, B and C form a normative part of this International Standard. Annexes D, E and F are for information
only.

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ISO 15919:2001(E)

Introduction
Script conversion is often required for documents such as historical and literary texts, geographical texts (including
maps and atlases), bibliographies, catalogues, lists and passports (and other identification documents).

Text in Devanagari script or other Indic scripts sometimes needs to be shown in Latin script, where users, or
equipment that they are using, cannot read or write the text.

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INTERNATIONAL STANDARD ISO 15919:2001(E)

Information and documentation — Transliteration of Devanagari

and related Indic scripts into Latin characters

1 Scope
This International Standard provides tables which enable the transliteration into Latin characters from text in Indic
scripts which are largely specified in rows 09 to 0D of UCS (ISO/IEC 10646-1 and Unicode).

The tables provide for the Devanagari, Bengali (including the characters used for writing Assamese), Gujarati,
Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil, and Telugu scripts which are used in India, Nepal,
Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, and Oriya scripts are North Indian
scripts, and the Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu scripts are South Indian scripts.

The Burmese, Khmer, Thai, Lao and Tibetan scripts which also share a common origin with the Indic scripts, and
which are used predominantly in Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Bhutan and the Tibetan Autonomous
Region within China, are not covered by this International Standard.

This International Standard applies to transliteration of Devanagari, and to Indic scripts related to Devanagari,
independent of the period in which it is or was used (i.e. for Devanagari script it can be used for transliterating text
in classical Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, and the Vedic language, for instance).

Other Indic scripts whose character repertoires are covered by the tables may also be transliterated using this
International Standard.

Options in this International Standard are defined in clause 9.

2 Conformance
Text originally in non-Latin script which is converted to a Latin-script representation conforms to this International
Standard with or without any of the specific recommendations, if it follows the rules defined in 8.1 and the
conversion tables given in clause 7 and normative annexes A and B, with or without following any of the three
recommendations given in 8.2 and clause 12, all in accordance with the options defined in clause 9.

A claim of conformance shall specify which options have been chosen, and which recommendations have been
followed.

3 Normative references
The following normative documents contain provisions which, through reference in this text, constitute provisions of
this International Standard. For dated references, subsequent amendments to, or revisions of, any of these
publications do not apply. However, parties to agreements based on this International Standard are encouraged to
investigate the possibility of applying the most recent editions of the normative documents indicated below. For
undated references, the latest edition of the normative document referred to applies. Members of ISO and IEC
maintain registers of currently valid International Standards.

ISO/IEC 10646-1, Information technology — Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS) — Part 1:
Architecture and Basic Multilingual Plane

ISO/IEC 646:1991, Information technology — ISO 7-bit coded character set for information interchange

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ISO 15919:2001(E)

4 Terms and definitions

For the purposes of this International Standard, the following terms and definitions apply.

4.1
conversion
representing graphic characters from a source script by the graphic characters of a target script, most commonly by
romanization

NOTE The two basic methods of conversion of a system of writing are transliteration and transcription. The use of the
terms source script and target script in transliteration is analogous to the terms source language and target language in
translation.

4.2
script
set of graphic characters used for the written form of one or more languages

4.3
graphic character
character (other than a control character) that has a visual representation, normally handwritten, printed or
displayed

NOTE A graphic character is a single element of a script. Examples are letters, conjunct characters, numerical digits,
punctuation marks or diacritical marks.

4.4
reverse transliteration
process whereby the characters of a target script are transliterated into those of the source script

NOTE This International Standard aims to enable reverse-transliterated text to be identical to the original source text up to
equivalent orthography. However, non-reversible transcription-like transliterations are often found to be useful when quoting
recent material.

4.5
romanization
conversion of non-Latin graphic characters into Latin graphic characters, using either transliteration or transcription

4.6
transcription
representation of the sounds of a source language by graphic characters associated with a target language

4.7
transliteration
representation of the graphic characters of a source script by the graphic characters of a target script

NOTE In transcription, pronunciation conventions are of primary importance, while in transliteration, writing conventions are
of primary importance.

4.8
UCS
Universal Multiple-Octet Coded Character Set (UCS) as defined in ISO/IEC 10646-1

NOTE 1 The Indic scripts listed in ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 form a subset (with identical codes) of the Indic scripts listed in
ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000. Similarly, the Indic scripts listed in the Unicode standard (version 1.0 onwards) form a subset (with
identical codes) to the Indic scripts listed in ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000 and the Unicode standard, version 3.0. Any of these
standards provide valid character codes for the specific characters concerned.

NOTE 2 ISO/IEC 10646-1 is increasingly used for providing character identifiers in a wide range of International Standards,
including some in this International Standard. Use of these identifiers does not impose any requirements to use ISO/IEC 10646-1 or
any other character coding standard to represent either the source characters or the target characters in any computer system or
in information interchange.

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ISO 15919:2001(E)

5 Abbreviated terms

¾ Ben. Bengali script

¾ Dev. Devanagari script

¾ Guj. Gujarati script

¾ Gur. Gurmukhi script

¾ Kan. Kannada script

¾ Mal. Malayalam script

¾ Ori. Oriya script

¾ Tam. Tamil script

¾ Tel. Telugu script

¾ Sin. Sinhala script

¾ P-A. Perso-Arabic script

6 Characteristics of Indic scripts

Characters in Indic scripts represent vowels, consonants and their combinations; nasalization, breathings,
numerals and punctuation.

Each vowel has a full form (occupying a full character space in text, and required when beginning a word or in
vowel hiatus) and a combining form (mātrā ) used when the vowel follows a consonant, except that the short a
standing at the beginning of Indic alphabets has only a full form, because no mātrā is required (see below).

Consonants include stops, semivowels, spirants, and other speech sounds. Stop consonants are arranged in
classes, or vargas, according to the point of articulation, and within each class are subdivided into unvoiced or
voiced, unaspirated or aspirated consonants, and a nasal consonant.

Characters for consonants are most simply quoted in a form which includes the inherent vowel a, as in the first
consonant ka in Table 1. The inherent vowel is removed by the virāma sign of the relevant script (Dev., Ben., Guj.,

Gur., Ori. #/ , Tam. #/, Tel. #R , Kan. #/, Mal. #/, Sin. # . AThe relevant mātrā is used when any other vowel
follows a consonant. Consonant clusters frequently form conjunct characters. Use of virāma to form consonant
clusters is unusual, except in Tamil where it is the normal method. When a mātrā is associated with a consonant, it
replaces the inherent vowel. Mātrās have various forms, even in a single script, and details may be found in
dictionaries and grammars.

It is important to note that many Indic characters have variant forms. Such differences of orthography are not
distinguished in this International Standard.

Devanagari is used for writing various modern languages, such as Hindi, Marathi, Rajasthani and other languages
in India, and Nepali in Nepal. Devanagari and most of the other Indic scripts are used for writing classical
languages often used in religious texts, such as the Sanskrit and Vedic languages, and Pali. In some cases, text in
Indic scripts uses additional characters for writing words in languages which do not normally use these scripts.
Thus some Urdu consonants are typically represented by adding a dot (nuqta) below certain letters (see Table 1,
normative annex C and informative annex D). Two English vowels may also be represented. Devanagari has also
been extended to write South Indian languages.

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ISO 15919:2001(E)

Sinhala script (used in Sri Lanka) has additional letters, in comparison with the scripts which are used in India,
Nepal and Bangladesh. Tamil script (used in South India and also in Sri Lanka) uses fewer characters, in
comparison with other scripts which are used in India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

When the Bengali script is used to write the Assamese language (in parts of North India), two characters not used
in writing Bengali are required. Hence the Assamese script is sometimes regarded as separate from the Bengali
script.

7 Transliteration tables
7.1 The transliteration from each Indic script to the Latin script shall be as specified in the Tables 1 to 10 and
A.3, subject to the rules specified in 8.1 and the options specified in clause 9.

7.2 The structure of the transliteration tables is explained in the following paragraphs.

The target characters (Latin script) fall within the ranges 0020-01FF and 0300-0332 of ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000.

The repertoires for many of the source characters fall within the following ranges of ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000, for the
script concerned:

¾ 0900-097F Devanagari

¾ 0980-09FF Bengali

¾ 0A00-0A7F Gurmukhi

¾ 0A80-0AFF Gujarati

¾ 0B00-0B7F Oriya

¾ 0B80-0BFF Tamil

¾ 0C00-0C7F Telugu

¾ 0C80-0CFF Kannada

¾ 0D00-0D7F Malayalam

¾ 0D80-0DFF Sinhala

Some additional Indic scripts whose character repertoires are included in the character repertoires of these scripts
are listed in informative annex E.

Consonants are shown with their inherent vowel a.

Only a single form of each Indic character is shown, just as in ISO/IEC 10646-1. Specifications of alternative forms
of these characters, including shapes when these are included in conjunct forms or in consonant-vowel
combinations, are outside the scope of this International Standard.

This clause gives tables for each script, with references to the rules of 8.1. Numerals are shown in Table A.3 of
annex A. Tables 1 to 10 are in the order of ISO 10646-1:2000. Vowels are shown in full form followed by a typical
form of the corresponding mātrā.

Normative annex A gives tables showing linguistically equivalent characters in each script (except that Gurmukhi
Bindi is not exactly equivalent to anusvara in the other scripts). Extended and ancient characters, apart from
numerals, are shown in Table A.2 unless an equivalent modern character exists in another script, in which case
they are enclosed in round brackets in Table A.1. (See also the requirements in clause 10.) In Tables A.1 to A.3
the scripts are ordered according to similarity of character repertoires.

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ISO 15919:2001(E)

A few rare characters for which attestation is not currently available are omitted.

Normative annex B gives the transliteration table (Table B.1) that shall be used when it is necessary to avoid use of
Latin letters with diacritics.

Normative annex C gives the recommended method of transliterating Indic characters specified as representing
Perso-Arabic characters (Table C.1 and its rules of application).

In the “Ref.” column of all these tables, the 3-digit decimal references are derived from hexadecimal to decimal
conversion of character codes in ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000. Note that the earlier International Standard
ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993 also includes these decimal codes explicitly in its tables, in case visual comparisons are
required between this International Standard and ISO/IEC 10646-1.

3-digit decimal characters with an additional letter refer to characters not in ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000.

The order of characters in tables follows approximate alphabetical order, rather than the order in
ISO/IEC 10646-1:2000.

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