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 script 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. However, the Hunterian transliteration system is the "national system of romanization in India" and a United Nations expert group noted about ISO 15919 that "there is no evidence of the use of the system either in India or in international cartographic products."
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 specification exists for it) but a convention developed in Europe for the transliteration of Sanskrit rather than the transcription of Indic scripts.
As a notable difference, both international standards, ISO 15919 and UNRSGN transliterate anusvara as á¹, while ALA-LC and IAST use ṃ for it. However, ISO 15919 provides guidance towards disambiguating between various anusvara situations (such as labial versus dental nasalizations), which is described in the table below.
Fonts supporting Unicode characters
Only certain fonts can support all Indic ISO 15919 Unicode character sets. For example, Tahoma supports most Unicode characters needed for Indic language transliteration. Arial and Times New Roman font packages that come with Microsoft Office 2007 (but not with MS Office 2003 or earlier) also support most "Latin extended additional" ISO 15919 Unicode characters like á¸', ḥ, ḷ, ḻ, á¹, á¹…, ṇ, á¹›, á¹£, á¹, etc.
Comparison with UNRSGN and IAST
The table below shows the differences between ISO 15919, UNRSGN and IAST for Devanagari transliteration.
