Romanagari
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Romanagari, a portmanteau of the words Roman and Devanagari, is a slang word coined by bloggers.[1] It refers to Hindi text written or typed in Roman script, as opposed to the standard Devanagari script. A possible reason for this is that Hindi-speaking computer users may lack tools necessary for typing in Hindi. The term may also be used for other languages that use Devanagari as the standard writing script, such as Marathi, Nepali or Sanskrit.
Example
"Main amit hun. Mera desh bharat hai, kitni achhi baat hai ki aaj hum yahan hain, apne desh ki dharati par. Is mitti ki khushbu, kahin bhi chale jao, mahsus hoti hai. deh chahe kahin bhi ho, man hamesha desh mein rahta hai."
As English is widely used a professional and higher-education language in India, availability of Devanagari keyboards is dwarfed by English keyboards. Similarly, software and user interfaces released and promoted in India are in English, as is much of the computer education available there. Due to low awareness of Devanagari keyboard layouts, many Indian users type Hindi in the Roman script.
Before Devanagari was added to Unicode, many workarounds were used to display Devanagari on the Internet, and many sites and services have continued using them despite widespread availability of Unicode fonts supporting Devanagari.
Difficulties
As Hindi is neither traditionally taught nor used in the Roman script, it is difficult for Hindi speakers, fluent or otherwise, to read Hindi transliterated to Roman, and may be distracting from the matter at hand.
Although there are several transliteration conventions on transliterating Hindi to Roman, most of these are reliant on diacritics. As most Indians are familiar with the Roman script through the English language (which traditionally does not use diacritics), these transliteration systems are much less widely known. Most such "Romanagari" is transliterated arbitrarily to imitate English spelling, and thus results in numerous inconsistencies.
It is also detrimental to search engines, which do not classify Hindi text in the Roman script as Hindi. The same text may also not be classified as English.
Solutions
Regardless of the physical keyboard's layout, it is possible to install Unicode-based Hindi keyboard layouts on most modern operating systems.
There are many online services available that transliterate text written in Roman to Devanagari accurately, using Hindi dictionaries for reference, such as Google transliteration. This solution is similar to Input method Editors, which are traditionally used to input text in languages that use complex characters such as Chinese, Japanese or Korean.
