IAST
The
International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (
IAST) is the academic standard for the
Romanization of Sanskrit. IAST is the de-facto standard used in printed publications, like books and magazines, and with the wider availability of
Unicode fonts, it is also increasingly used for electronic texts. It is based on a standard established by the
Congress of Orientalists at
Athens in
1912.
The IAST allows a lossless
transliteration of
Devanagari (and other Indic alphabets, such as
), and as such 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 Calcutta romanization, intended for the romanization of all
Indic scripts, is an extension of IAST.
The sign inventory of IAST (both small and Capital letters) shown with Devanagari equivalents and phonetic values in
IPA, is as follows (essentially valid for
Sanskrit, though for Hindi, some minor phonological changes have occurred):
Note: 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 never occurring word-initially () are only useful in contexts, where the convention is to typeset the
IT sounds as capital letters (see ).
*
Romanization of Sanskrit*
Harvard-Kyoto*
ITRANS*
National Library at Calcutta romanization*
ISO 15919*
Shiva Sutra
