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.

IAST sign inventory and conventions

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 ).

See also

• Romanization of Sanskrit
• Harvard-Kyoto
• ITRANS
• National Library at Calcutta romanization
• ISO 15919
• Shiva Sutra

Sanskrit | Romanization

Tarptautinė Sanskrito Alfabeto Transliteracija | IAST | IAST