Sanskrit (India) style guide¶
Apply these local conventions alongside the house voice and localization review. Source acknowledgments are in credits.
Address and terminology¶
Write clear, respectful Sanskrit. Choose the register for the audience and keep it consistent. भवान् is a polite masculine form of address and takes a third-person verb. It is not interchangeable with त्वम् in an otherwise unchanged sentence, nor is it a universal gender-neutral form.
The ordinary second-person pronouns distinguish three numbers:
| Number | Nominative pronoun |
|---|---|
| One person | त्वम् |
| Two people | युवाम् |
| More than two | यूयम् |
These forms distinguish number, not three degrees of formality. Changing भवान् प्रपत्रं पूरयतु। to त्वं प्रपत्रं पूरय। changes the form of address and the verb together. Both ask someone to fill in a form, but the second is not a neutral mechanical correction of the first. Review register, gender and agreement together.
Keep commands distinct from statements. The statement युवां तत्र गच्छथः। means that the two addressees go there; it is not an imperative instruction. Do not choose a source example merely because it contains a second-person pronoun. Use approved terms, and preserve the actor, object, ownership, condition and uncertainty when recasting English syntax.
Spelling and linguistic marks¶
This page covers Sanskrit in Devanagari. The script has no uppercase/lowercase distinction; retained Latin names and identifiers keep their required case.
Write रामः with the visarga ः (U+0903), not राम: with an ASCII colon. The visarga belongs to the word; its shape does not make it punctuation. Preserve vowel signs, the virama and the avagraha ऽ in verified spellings. Do not insert spaces inside a word to imitate a PDF extraction error.
A nukta is not part of ordinary native Sanskrit spelling. That is no reason to strip marks from quoted words, names or literal text in other languages. Review the actual term. See scripts and typography for text identity and rendering checks.
Abbreviations and punctuation¶
Abbreviate only where the reader will recognize the result. Localized examples include मी, किमी, सेमी, मिमी, ग्रा, किग्रा, ली and मिली. These word abbreviations differ from international unit symbols such as m, km, g, kg and mL, which keep their fixed case and take no plural ending or abbreviation dot.
Keep established acronyms such as HTML, USB and DNS intact when appropriate. Explain unfamiliar terms in Sanskrit. A transcription of the letters is not an explanation of the term. Do not turn one supplied plural abbreviation into a rule for every borrowed word.
Use the danda । for declarative sentences in this guide's Sanskrit prose. Full-sentence bullets take sentence punctuation; short phrases do not. Use quotation marks for quotations and the house formatting for UI labels. Apply punctuation to surrounding prose. Preserve the period in a literal version such as 4.2.
Numbers, dates and interface review¶
Use words for small numbers when natural in prose; keep exact measurements, limits and input values numeric. Keep units with values, as in 30 cm, 1 h and 20 °C. The minus in −10 °C is a minus sign. Test percentage output from the locale formatter instead of assuming that every symbol takes the same space.
Use day–month–year order for ordinary numeric dates, as in 01/01/2025. A month-and-year source stays at that precision; do not invent a day. Preserve both endpoints of ranges and the calendar of the original date.
Avoid unnecessary gender assumptions without erasing relevant roles or ownership. “Healthy” does not mean “without a disability.” Follow accessible content, and preserve the required interface action. Test whole count messages, substituted values, wrapping and task meaning with a proficient Sanskrit reviewer.