This International Standard provides tables which enable the transliteration into Latin characters from text in Indic scripts which are largely specified in rows 09 to 0D of UCS (ISO/IEC 10646-1 and Unicode).

The tables provide for the Devanagari, Bengali (including the characters used for writing Assamese), Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Sinhala, Tamil, and Telugu scripts which are used in India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The Devanagari, Bengali, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, and Oriya scripts are North Indian scripts, and the Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu scripts are South Indian scripts.

The Burmese, Khmer, Thai, Lao and Tibetan scripts which also share a common origin with the Indic scripts, and which are used predominantly in Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Bhutan and the Tibetan Autonomous Region within China, are not covered by this International Standard.

This International Standard applies to transliteration of Devanagari, and to Indic scripts related to Devanagari, independent of the period in which it is or was used (i.e. for Devanagari script it can be used for transliterating text in classical Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, and the Vedic language, for instance).

Other Indic scripts whose character repertoires are covered by the tables may also be transliterated using this International Standard.

Options in this International Standard are defined in clause 9.