ISO 259-3 is a standard for the phonemic conversion/representation of Hebrew in the Latin script. It is aimed on delivering the common structure of the Hebrew word throughout the different dialects or pronunciation styles of Hebrew, in a way that it can be reconstructed into the original Hebrew characters by both man and machine. It is part of a series of standards (ISO 259) dealing with the conversion of Hebrew characters into Latin characters (Romanization), but it isn't a character-by-character transliteration nor a phonetic transcription of one pronunciation style of Hebrew. It is phonemic from the view point that all the different dialects and pronunciations of Hebrew through the generations can be seen basically as different realizations of the same structure, and by predefined reading rules every pronunciation style can be directly derived from it.
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Each consonant character in the Hebrew script is converted into its unique Latin character:
| Hebrew | א | ב | ג | ד | ה | ו | ז | ח | ט | י | כ | ל | מ | נ | ס | ע | פ | צ | ק | ר | ש | ת | ג׳ | ז׳ | צ׳ | שׂ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Latin | ˀ or ` | b | g | d | h | w | z | ḥ | ṭ | y | k | l | m | n | s | ˁ or ˊ | p | c | q | r | š | t | ǧ | ž | č | ś |
There are five vowel characters, corresponding to the five vowel phonemes of Modern Israeli Hebrew: a, e, i, o, u. In addition there is a sixth sign for denoting the vowel /e/ that is written followed by י in common Hebrew spelling: ei.