The "Indian languages TRANSliteration" (ITRANS) is an ASCII transliteration scheme for Indic scripts, particularly, but not exclusively, for Devanāgarī (used for the Hindi, Marathi, Sanskrit, Nepali, Sindhi and other languages). It was developed by Avinash Chopde. The latest version of ITRANS is version 5.30 released in July, 2001. There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ... Transliteration is the practice of transcribing a word or text written in one writing system into another writing system. ... The Brahmic family is a family of abugidas (writing systems) used in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Tibet, Mongolia, Manchuria. ... DevanāgarÄ« (IPA: ; Sanskrit: , , IPA:  [?]) is an abugida writing system used to write, either along with other scripts, or exclusively, several North Indian languages, including Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Sindhi, Bihari, Bhili, Marwari, Konkani, Bhojpuri, Nepali, Nepal Bhasa from Nepal and sometimes Kashmiri and Romani. ... Hindi (Devanagari: हिन्दी or हिंदी; IPA: ), an Indo-European language spoken mainly in northern and central India, is one of the official languages of the Union government of India [1][2]. It is part of a dialect continuum of the Indic family, bounded on the northwest and west by Punjabi, Sindhi, Urdu... Marathi is one of the widely spoken languages of India, and has a long literary history. ... The Sanskrit language ( , for short ) is an old Indo-Aryan language from the Indian Subcontinent, the classical literary language of the Hindus of India[1], a liturgical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, and one of the 23 official languages of India. ... Nepali could mean: Nepali — A citizen of the country of Nepal. ... SindhÄ« (सिन्धी, سنڌي) is the language of the Sindh region of South Asia, which is now a province of Pakistan. ...

It was in some use for the encoding of Indian etexts, it is wider in scope than the Harvard-Kyoto scheme for Devanāgarī transliteration, with which it coincides largely, but not entirely. With the wider implementation of Unicode, the traditional IAST is used increasingly also for electronic texts. An e-text (from electronic text; sometimes written as etext) is, generally, any textual information that is available in a digitally encoded human-readable format and read by electronic means, but more specifically it refers to files in the ASCII text file format. ... The Harvard-Kyoto Convention is a system for transliterating the Sanskrit language in ASCII. It is predominantly used informally in e-mail, and for electronic texts. ... DevanāgarÄ« (IPA: ; Sanskrit: , , IPA:  [?]) is an abugida writing system used to write, either along with other scripts, or exclusively, several North Indian languages, including Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Sindhi, Bihari, Bhili, Marwari, Konkani, Bhojpuri, Nepali, Nepal Bhasa from Nepal and sometimes Kashmiri and Romani. ... Unicode is an industry standard designed to allow text and symbols from all of the writing systems of the world to be consistently represented and manipulated by computers. ... IAST, or International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration is the academic standard for writing the Sanskrit language with the Latin alphabet and very similar to National Library at Calcutta romanization standard being used with many Indic scripts. ...

For some letters, there are variants: e.g. long vowels can be transcribed either by doubling the simple vowel, or with capitals.

Vowels (dependent and independent):

 a aa / A i ii / I u uu / U RRi / R^i RRI / R^I LLi / L^i LLI / L^I e ai o au aM aH 

Consonants:

 k kh g gh ~N ch Ch j jh ~n T Th D Dh N t th d dh n p ph b bh m y r l v / w sh Sh s h L x / kSh GY / j~n / dny shr R (for marathi half-RA) L / ld (marathi LLA) Y (bengali) 

Consonants with a nukta (dot) under them (mainly for Urdu Devanāgarī):

 k with a dot: q kh with a dot: K g with a dot: G j with a dot: z / J p with a dot: f D with a dot: .D Dh with a dot: .Dh 

Specials/Accents:

 Anusvara: .n / M / .m Avagraha (elision): .a Ardhachandra: .c Chandra-Bindu: .N Halant: .h Visarga: H Om (Om symbol): OM, AUM 

See also

• Devanagari transliteration
• IAST
• Harvard-Kyoto
• National Library at Kolkata romanization

It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Devanagari. ... IAST, or International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration is the academic standard for writing the Sanskrit language with the Latin alphabet and very similar to National Library at Calcutta romanization standard being used with many Indic scripts. ... The Harvard-Kyoto Convention is a system for transliterating the Sanskrit language in ASCII. It is predominantly used informally in e-mail, and for electronic texts. ... The National Library at Kolkata romanization is the most widely used transliteration scheme in dictionaries and grammars of Indic languages. ...

External links

• ITRANS Official site
• HiTrans - Online ITRANS to Unicode converter with scheme extensions
• site on ITRANS and religious content in ITRANS
• View Unicode Hindi through Roman transliteration (ITRNS scheme)
• Downloadable ITRANS to Unicode transformer A simple Java applet demo, with source code. Uses a simple table based extendable algorithm.