Wiktionary:Hindi transliteration

These are the rules concerning transliteration in Hindi entries.

Wiktionary's system for the transliteration of Devanagari for Hindi corresponds mostly to the International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) system. The main changes from the IAST standard are meant to optimise the system for Hindi, rather than Sanskrit, and are mostly present in the romanisation of nasal vowels.

Characters used in Sanskrit but not Hindi are not included in this guide.

The nasal diacritics ं (̃) (अनुस्वार, anusvara) and ँ (̃) (चन्द्रबिन्दु, candrabindu) are "transliterated" according to their context in a word. Basically, the consonant (or lack thereof) immediately following the nasal vowel determines exactly how the transliteration will occur.

1. First, a tilde diacritic is added to the nasalized vowel

   ã, ā̃, ẽ, ĩ, ī̃, ũ, ū̃, etc.

   — For words ending in a nasal anusvara, this will usually suffice with no extra characters added to the end.

   e.g. आदमियों = ādmiyõ

2. If a consonant follows the nasalized vowel, the transliteration of the consonant's corresponding nasal consonant follows.

   Gutturals (क, ख, ग, घ, ह) will use ṅ (for ङ)

   Dentals (त, थ, द, ध, ल, स) will use n (for न)

   Labials (प, फ, ब, भ, व) will use m (for म), etc.

   — 'n' and 'm' are disambiguated from न and म by the tilde of the preceding vowel.

   e.g. रंग = rãṅg

The ़ (नुक़्ता, nuqtā) diacritic describes sounds not found in Sanskrit, and therefore not represented by standard Devanagari. Most of these sounds are found in Persian and English loanwords.

The conjunct ज्ञ, which is a combination of ज and ञ and transliterated as ⟨jñ⟩, while pronounced /ɟɲ/ in Sanskrit is often pronounced /gj/ in Hindi.

ळ is pronounced as /ɭ/ and transliterated ⟨ḷ⟩. ऴ is used to represent the Malayalam/Tamil consonants ഴ or ழ /ɻ/, transliterated as ⟨ḻ⟩. व़ is pronounced as /w/ and transliterated as ⟨w⟩.

Visarga symbol ः is transliterated as ⟨ḥ⟩, e.g. दुःख (duḥkh), छः (chaḥ).

See also

• Module:hi-translit