Hunterian transliteration

The Hunterian transliteration system is the "national system of romanization in India" and the one officially adopted by the Government of India. Hunterian transliteration was sometimes also called the Jonesian transliteration system because it derived closely from a previous transliteration method developed by William Jones (1746–1794). Upon its establishment, the Sahitya Akademi (India's National Academy of Letters) also adopted the Hunterian method, with additional adaptations, as its standard method of maintaining its bibliography of Indian-language works.

The original precursor to the Hunterian system was a transliteration method developed by Charles Wilkins, who is sometimes called the "father of Devanagari typography" because he was also the creator of the first Devanagari typeface. William Jones, who also founded the Asiatic Society, further developed the transliteration method. It was given a more complete form in the late nineteenth century by William Wilson Hunter, then Surveyor General of India. When it was proposed, it immediately met with opposition from supporters of the phonetic Dowler system, which climaxed in a dramatic showdown in an India Council meeting on 28 May 1872 where the new Hunterian method carried the day. The Hunterian method was inherently simpler and extensible to several Indic scripts because it systematized grapheme transliteration, and it came to prevail and gain government and academic acceptance. Opponents of the grapheme transliteration model continued to mount unsuccessful attempts at reversing government policy until the turn of the century, with one critic calling appealing to "the Indian Government to give up the whole attempt at scientific (i.e. Hunterian) transliteration, and decide once and for all in favour of a return to the old phonetic spelling."

Over time, the Hunterian method extended in reach to cover several Indic scripts, including Burmese and Tibetan. The Hunterian system was used to establish writing systems that used the Latin alphabet for some Indian languages that were previously not associated with a written script, such as Mizo. In the case of Mizo, the Hunterian-based writing system "has proved hugely successful." Provisions for schwa deletion in Indo-Aryan languages were also made where applicable, e.g. the Hindi कानपुर is transliterated as kānpur (and not kānapura) but the Sanskrit क्रम is transliterated as krama (and not kram). The system has undergone some evolution over time. For instance, long vowels were marked with an accent diacritic in the original version, but this was later replaced in the 1954 Government of India update with a macron. Thus, जान ('life') was previously romanized as ján but began to be romanized as jān. Additional diacritics have been proposed for various purposes, such as disambiguating letters of PersoArabic that map to a single Devanagari grapheme (e.g. ث, س and ص which all map to स). Some languages of the region are tonal, such as Mizo and Punjabi, and accent marks over vowels have been repurposed to indicate tone for some of them.

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