Marathi to English Transliteration

Same script as Hindi, different language

Marathi and Hindi are both written in Devanagari, so a tool that handles one appears to handle the other. For most words that holds. The differences are narrow but they are real, and the first one is a letter Hindi does not have at all:

That last row is a limit of transliteration itself rather than of this tool. Transliteration follows the letters that are written; if the writing system does not record a distinction, nothing downstream can recover it. A pronunciation guide would need a dictionary, which is a different kind of product.

Why "Maharashtra" keeps its last vowel but "namaskar" does not

Devanagari gives every consonant a built-in a that is written but, in Marathi and Hindi, usually not pronounced at the end of a word. A conversion that keeps it produces "bhārata" and "namaskāra" where people say bhārat and namaskār, so we delete it. The catch is that it is not always silent:

We found this one by testing rather than by reading: our rule was deleting the vowel after clusters too, which turned महाराष्ट्र into "mahārāṣṭr". On a twenty-eight word set the old rule got eighteen right and the corrected one gets all twenty-eight. It is documented on the About page with every other adjustment we make.

Marathi place names

Place names are where the standard romanization and the spelling on the road sign part company, because the English spellings were fixed long before any standard existed:

नागपूर is the clearest case: the tool gives nāgapūr and everyone writes Nagpur. Both are defensible. Marathi also drops some vowels in the middle of a word, not only at the end, and working out which ones needs a dictionary of pronunciations rather than a rule. We apply the end-of-word rule and leave the internal ones alone rather than guessing, which is why you will occasionally see a vowel the English spelling omits.

If you came here to type Marathi, read this first

Most searches for "English to Marathi transliteration" want a Marathi typing tool: you type namaskar on an ordinary keyboard and you get नमस्कार. That is the opposite direction from this page, and we have not shipped it, because the easy version of it is wrong most of the time.

English spelling does not separate the sounds Devanagari keeps apart, so a word typed in Latin letters has several valid readings and only one is the word you meant:

A letter-mapping table cannot choose between those columns, because what you typed does not contain the information needed to choose. The tools that do this well, Google's input method and the open-source GoVarnam among them, generate every candidate the table allows and then pick between them with a dictionary of real words. We tested the table-only approach on Tamil, which has the same problem, and it scored three correct words out of ten.

Where the conversion data comes from

We are not linguists and we do not invent romanization rules. Marathi conversion runs on the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository transliteration data through PHP's Transliterator class, the same ICU implementation browsers and operating systems use, following ISO 15919. We make two changes, both shared with Hindi, Gujarati and Punjabi: we remove the disambiguation apostrophes ICU inserts, and we delete the silent word-final vowel, stopping at consonant clusters as described above. Every adjustment we apply to any language is listed on the About page.

What this tool does not do

• It does not translate. नमस्कार comes back as namaskār, which is how it sounds. What it means is "greetings", and that is a translator's job.
• It does not type Marathi for you. English to Marathi needs a dictionary-backed input method, not a conversion table.
• It does not delete vowels inside a word. नागपूर gives nāgapūr, not "nagpur". Knowing which internal vowels are silent needs a pronunciation dictionary.
• It cannot tell you how च and ज are pronounced. Marathi reads them two ways and the script does not record which, so neither can a transliteration.