Romanisation of Malayalam

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There are several romanisation schemes for the Malayalam script, including ITRANS and ISO 15919.

Contents

ASCII schemes

Typesetting Malayalam on computers became an issue with their spread in the late 20th century. The lack of diacritics on keyboards led to the adoption of ASCII only romanisation schemes. ASCII only schemes remain popular in email correspondence and input methods because of their ease of entry. These schemes are also called Manglish. The disadvantage of ASCII schemes is that letter case is meaningful, so that transliterated names may not be capitalised.

Mozhi

The Mozhi system of transliteration [1] is an unofficial system used to transliterate Malayalam, it can also be used for Tamil. This system does not need the use of diacritics. Even though it has more elaborate scheme, Mozhi [2] is as follows:

aa i ii u uu R RR e  E  ai o O  au Ll Lll am aH  k  kh  g gh ng ch chh j jh nj T  Th  D Dh N th thh d dh n p  ph  b bh m  y  r   l v S  sh  s h L  zh  rr t

ITRANS

ITRANS is an ASCII scheme which does not use diacritics for transliteration to Latin script.

National Library at Kolkata romanisation

The "National Library at Kolkata romanisation" is one of the most widely used transliteration schemes in dictionaries and grammars of Indo-Aryan languages and Dravidian languages including Malayalam. This transliteration scheme is also known as '(American) Library of Congress' scheme and is nearly identical to one of the possible ISO 15919 variants. The scheme is an extension of the IAST scheme that is used for transliteration of Sanskrit.

ISO 15919

ISO 15919 "Transliteration of Devanagari and related Indic scripts into Latin characters" is one of a series of international standards for romanisation. It was published in 2001 and uses diacritics to map the much larger set of consonants and vowels in Brahmic scripts to the Latin script.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Malayalam script</span> Brahmic script used commonly to write the Malayalam language

Malayalam script is a Brahmic script used commonly to write Malayalam, which is the principal language of Kerala, India, spoken by 45 million people in the world. It is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry by the Malayali people. It is one of the official scripts of the Indian Republic. Malayalam script is also widely used for writing Sanskrit texts in Kerala.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Romanization</span> Transliteration or transcription to Latin characters

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The Harvard-Kyoto Convention is a system for transliterating Sanskrit and other languages that use the Devanāgarī script into ASCII. It is predominantly used informally in e-mail, and for electronic texts.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Latin script</span> Writing system based on the alphabet used by the Romans

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The Mozhi is a popular romanization scheme for Malayalam script. It is primarily used for Input Method Editors for Malayalam and loosely based on ITrans scheme for Devanagari.

There are several systems for romanization of the Telugu script.

The Sanskrit Library Phonetic basic encoding scheme (SLP1) is an ASCII transliteration scheme for the Sanskrit language from and to the Devanagari script.

The Velthuis system of transliteration is an ASCII transliteration scheme for the Sanskrit language from and to the Devanagari script. It was developed in about 1983 by Frans Velthuis, a scholar living in Groningen, Netherlands, who created a popular, high-quality software package in LaTeX for typesetting Devanāgarī. The primary documentation for the scheme is the system's clearly-written software manual. It is based on using the ISO 646 repertoire to represent mnemonically the accents used in standard scholarly transliteration. It does not use diacritics as IAST does. It may optionally use capital letters in a manner similar but not identical to the Harvard-Kyoto or ITRANS schemes.manual para 4.1

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