Why the Same Baby Name Has Ten Spellings Across South Asia

Shiv, Shiva, Siva, Sivan. Lakshmi, Laxmi, Lakshmee. Same name, genuinely different spellings — here's the actual reason, and why none of them is "the correct one."

Search this site's Baby Name Finder for almost any South Asian name and you'll find the same question buried in the data: is it Krishna or Krishn? Priya or Priyaa? Mohammed, Muhammad or Mohammad? The honest answer is that all of these can be equally correct, because the spelling you're looking at was never the name's real form to begin with — it's a guess at how to write a sound from one writing system using the letters of another one entirely, and different people guess differently for entirely defensible reasons.

It starts with the script, not the alphabet

Most South Asian languages — Hindi, Sanskrit, Marathi, Nepali and more — are written in Devanagari; Bengali and Assamese use their own related script; Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam each have their own distinct scripts again; Punjabi uses Gurmukhi; Urdu uses a Persian-derived script written right to left. None of these is the Latin alphabet English uses, which means every single English spelling of a South Asian name is already a transliteration — someone's attempt to represent a sound using letters that weren't designed for it. There is no original "English spelling" to get right or wrong, only transliterations that are more or less close to the sound.

Sounds English spelling can't cleanly hold

Several real distinctions in these languages simply don't map onto a 26-letter Latin alphabet without extra marks most people don't type. Aspirated and unaspirated consonants are a genuine pair of different sounds in Hindi and Sanskrit — "k" and "kh", "t" and "th", "d" and "dh", "b" and "bh" — but casual English spelling frequently drops the "h" (Radha becomes Rada, Bhavna becomes Bavna). Retroflex consonants, made with the tongue curled back against the roof of the mouth, have no Latin letter at all and get approximated with "t", "d" or "r" depending on the transliterator. Vowel length is phonemic — a short "a" and long "ā" are different sounds that can change a word's meaning — but English spelling rarely marks the difference, which is a large part of why "Ravi" stays fixed while "Anita"/"Anitaa" and "Nilima"/"Neelima" both circulate for the same name.

The vowel that disappears in some languages but not others

Sanskrit and the scripts descended from it carry an "inherent vowel" — every consonant letter is assumed to be followed by a short "a" unless marked otherwise. Modern Hindi usually drops that final inherent "a" in speech (the god's name is written with the letters for "Krishna" but commonly said closer to "Krishn"), while Sanskrit recitation, South Indian languages and more conservative transliteration keep it. That single rule of pronunciation, applied inconsistently by different speakers and regions, is why you'll see both "Ram" and "Rama", both "Krishna" and "Krishn", referring to the exact same name.

No single government standard to appeal to

Linguists do have formal transliteration standards — IAST and ISO 15919 among them — that assign one unambiguous Latin spelling per sound, using diacritical marks (ā, ṣ, ṛ) most keyboards don't have and most parents never use on a birth certificate. In everyday life, a name's "official" English spelling is usually whatever a specific school, hospital or passport office typed on a specific day, in a country with 22 constitutionally recognised languages and no single Romanization rule enforced across all of them. A family's chosen spelling often says more about which state issued the document than about any error.

What this means when you're choosing a spelling

None of this means spelling doesn't matter for a real, living child — a family is entirely entitled to settle on one spelling and use it consistently. It does mean that if a search for a name on this site or anywhere else comes up thin, it's worth trying the obvious variants before concluding the name doesn't exist in the data: swap "v" for "w", "sh" for "s", add or drop a doubled vowel, add or drop the aspirated "h". The name is very likely there under a different, equally legitimate spelling.

This page describes general transliteration patterns across South Asian languages, which vary by specific language, script and region; it isn't a transliteration standard for any single name. Updated 2026-10-05.