The
International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (
IAST) is a popular
transliteration scheme that allows a lossless
romanization of
Indic scripts.
IAST is the most popular transliteration scheme for romanization of Sanskrit and Pali. It is often used in printed publications, especially for books dealing with ancient Sanskrit and Pali topics related to Indian religions. With the wider availability of Unicode fonts, it is also increasingly used for electronic texts.
IAST is based on a standard established by the International Congress of Orientalists at Geneva in 1894[1]. It allows a lossless transliteration of Devanagari (and other Indic scripts, such as Sharada script), 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 Kolkata romanization, intended for the romanization of all Indic scripts, is an extension of IAST.
