Romanization of Georgian

Georgian national system of romanization

This system, adopted in February 2002 by the State Department of Geodesy and Cartography of Georgia and the Institute of Linguistics, Georgian National Academy of Sciences, establishes a transliteration system of the Georgian letters into Latin letters. The system was already in use, since 1998, on driving licenses. It is also used by BGN and PCGN since 2009, as well as in Google Translate.

Unofficial system of romanization

Despite its popularity this system sometimes leads to ambiguity. The system is mostly used in social networks, forums, chat rooms, etc. The system is greatly influenced by the common QWERTY-derived Georgian keyboard layout that ties each key to each letter in the alphabet (seven of them: T, W, R, S, J, Z, C with the help of the shift key to make another letter).

ISO standard

ISO 9984:1996, "Transliteration of Georgian characters into Latin characters", was last reviewed and confirmed in 2010. The guiding principles in the standard are:

• No digraphs, i.e. one Latin letter per Georgian letter (apart from the apostrophe-like "High comma off center" (ISO 5426), which is mapped to "Combining comma above right" (U+0315) in Unicode, for aspirated consonants, whereas ejectives are unmarked, e.g.: კ → k, ქ → k̕
• Extended characters are mostly Latin letters with caron (haček – ž, š, č̕, č, ǰ), with the exception of "g macron" ღ → ḡ. Archaic extended characters are ē, ō, and ẖ (h with line below).
• No capitalization, both as it does not appear in the original script, and to avoid confusion with claimed popular ad hoc transliterations of caron characters as capitals instead. (e.g. შ as S for š)

Transliteration table

Archaic letters are shown on a red background.

Notes

References

References

1. United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names. (2007). "Technical reference manual for the standardization of geographical names". United Nations.
2. "ISO 9984:1996, Transliteration of Georgian characters into Latin characters".
3. [http://evertype.com/standards/iso10646/pdf/iso-5426.pdf Evertype.com: ISO 5426 mapping to Unicode]; [https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2000/00220-map-5426.pdf Joan M. Aliprand: ''Finalized Mapping between Characters of ISO 5426 and ISO/IEC 10646-1'']; [https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U02B0.pdf The Unicode Standard: Spacing Modifier Letters].