iast

IAST stands for International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration, a scholarly system for rendering Sanskrit and related languages into the Latin alphabet with diacritics. It was developed in the mid-20th century by the international Sanskrit scholarly community and is maintained by scholars associated with the International Association of Sanskrit Studies. The principal goal of IAST is to provide a precise, one-to-one transcription that maps cleanly to Devanagari and other Indic scripts, enabling accurate representation of phonology in critical editions, dictionaries, grammars, and linguistic research. IAST is the most widely used transliteration scheme in academic publications for Sanskrit, Pali, and related languages, and it is commonly used in digital texts and online resources.

Conventions and usage: IAST uses Latin letters with diacritics to indicate phonetic distinctions such as vowel length and consonant articulation. Long vowels are marked with macrons, and several consonants have specialized diacritic forms to reflect retroflex, dental, or aspirated sounds. Nasalization and certain other phonation features are indicated with diacritics as well. The system emphasizes faithful phonemic transcription rather than phonetic transcription, and its unambiguous encoding in Unicode makes it suitable for scholarly work. ASCII-based alternatives exist for input without diacritics, but IAST remains the standard for formal transliteration in most scholarly contexts.