Romanisation of Bengali

Romanisation of Bengali is the representation of written Bengali in the Latin script. Various romanisation systems for Bengali are used, most of which do not perfectly represent Bengali phonology. While different standards for romanisation have been proposed for Bengali, none has been adopted with the same degree of uniformity as Japanese or Sanskrit.

The Bengali script has been included with the group of Indic scripts whose romanisation does not represent the phonetic value of Bengali. Some of them are the "International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration" or IAST system (based on diacritics), "Indian languages Transliteration" or ITRANS (uses upper case alphabets suited for ASCII keyboards), and the National Library at Calcutta romanisation.

In the context of Bengali romanisation, it is important to distinguish transliteration from transcription. Transliteration is orthographically accurate (the original spelling can be recovered), but transcription is phonetically accurate (the pronunciation can be reproduced). English does not have all sounds of Bengali, and pronunciation does not completely reflect orthography. The aim of romanisation is not the same as phonetic transcription. Rather, romanisation is a representation of one writing system in the Latin script. For instance, Bengali অ corresponds to Sanskrit अ and is transliterated as a using the ISO 15919 system; however, the vowel is pronounced as /ɔ~o/ in Bengali (and in other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages) and not as /ɐ~ə/ as in Sanskrit and most other Indo-Aryan languages. The ISO 15919 system is strictly a transliteration scheme specifically designed for all Brahmi-derived scripts, and hence does not fully reflect historical sound changes and phonemic differences across languages. The writing systems of many languages do not faithfully represent the spoken sounds of the language, as with English words like enough, women, or nation (see "ghoti").