Arun Chandrasekaran

An Improved Roman Script for Writing Indian-Origin Words

September 12, 2019

What’s wrong with English?

English is a fine language in its own context. But when it comes to writing Indian words, English phonetics fail us. Take the word India for example. It should ideally begin with a soft “thi” (as in this), but in English it’s pronounced as “di” (as in did). Over time, Indian words transliterated into English have lost their original phonetic integrity.

Even the Wikipedia page on India doesn’t mention the IAST form of the name. I’m tired of pronouncing Thamizh as Tamil. Increasingly, Indians are pronouncing words based not on native scripts, but on their English spellings—a disturbing trend for a phonetic language system like ours. As native sounds fade from memory, we risk losing the soul of our languages.

Consider the following examples:

English	IAST	Devanagari	Tamil
India	Inḍiā	इंडिया	இந்தியா
Modi	Moḍī	मोदी	மோடி
Tamil	Tamiḻ	तमिऴ	தமிழ்

International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST)

Indian languages are inherently phonetic. Sounds (phones) are the soul of language, and scripts were developed to represent those sounds.

Over time, various Indian scripts—chief among them the Brahmic scripts—evolved to capture these sounds. Today, Devanagari is among the most widely used.

To bridge Indian languages and global readership, Roman transliteration became necessary. The IAST system, formalized in 1894, was created by Western scholars to provide a faithful, reversible mapping of Indian scripts using Roman characters. It was designed with scholarly precision, enabling readers to reproduce original sounds accurately.

What’s wrong with IAST?

While IAST is significantly better than standard English spellings, it’s not perfect. It’s still not intuitive to the average Indian speaker unfamiliar with its rules.

Examples:

• The Tamil sound த is rendered as t in IAST—but many read it as ட.
• The Hindi दी in Modi becomes Mōdī in IAST and Modi in English—but Tamil speakers often read it as Mōḍi.

Until around 2015, Tamil media used to write “Dhoni” as டோணி—an example of phonetic misunderstanding.

Moreover, Sanskrit-derived scripts typically lack short vowels like e and o, which are essential for correctly writing Dravidian languages. For example:

• Tamil: ondru
• Kannada: ondhu
• Telugu: okati

In IAST, the o in these would typically be misread as long, due to the Sanskrit-influenced vowel system.

What Should Be Fixed in IAST?

At a minimum, these corrections could make IAST more inclusive and phonetic:

• Swap T and Ṭ: T should represent ट, and Ṭ should represent त.
• Swap D and Ḍ: D should represent ड, and Ḍ should represent द.
• Use e for short e (as in egg), and ē or ee for long e (as in ace).
• Use o for short o (as in pot), and ō or oo for long o (as in door).
• Always use lowercase letters when writing Indian languages in Roman script, to remove ambiguity between aspirated/unaspirated and voiced/unvoiced pairs.

Should India Use a Common Script?

Ideally, India should move towards a phonetically complete, script-neutral system. I would go as far as recommending a pan-Indian adoption of the Malayalam script, which accommodates almost all phonemes across Indian languages. But due to practical and political challenges—especially the resistance to Hindi in Tamil Nadu—a unified script is unlikely in the near future.

Therefore, the next best solution is to modernize IAST and make it part of our curriculum. This can help students grasp pronunciation more accurately and preserve linguistic diversity.

Some argue this might threaten native scripts. But the widespread use of English already poses a greater risk. Rather than ignoring this, we must act consciously to preserve our linguistic heritage.

For Tamil speakers: the word தமிழ் is beautifully nuanced. Calling it “Tamil” does injustice to its phonetic richness. We must raise awareness and build consensus to promote a more faithful Romanization system.

If not IAST, then let’s work together to define something better. But let’s not remain silent and watch our languages fade into approximation.

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Final Thoughts

Language is identity. Scripts are memory. Sounds are emotion. Let’s not lose our languages by mispronouncing them through foreign eyes. Let’s update our transliteration systems to do justice to our roots.