Virama (Sanskrit: विराम/हलन्त, romanized: virāma/halanta ्) is a Sanskrit phonological concept to suppress the inherent vowel that otherwise occurs with every consonant letter, commonly used as a generic term for a codepoint in Unicode, representing either Unicode schemes of scripts writing Mainland Southeast Asia languages, such as that of Burmese script and of Tibetan script, generally do not group the two functions together.
Generally, when a dead consonant letter C1 and another consonant letter C2 are conjoined, the result may be: If the result is fully or half-conjoined, the (conceptual) virama which made C1 dead becomes invisible, logically existing only in a character encoding scheme such as ISCII or Unicode.
The sequences ङ्क ङ्ख ङ्ग ङ्घ [ṅka ṅkha ṅɡa ṅɡha], in common Sanskrit orthography, should be written as conjuncts (the virāma and the top cross line of the second letter disappear, and what is left of the second letter is written under the ङ and joined to it).
The inherent vowel is not always pronounced, in particular at the end of a word (schwa deletion).
Instead, the orthography is based on Sanskrit where all inherent vowels are pronounced, and leaves to the reader of modern languages to delete the schwa when appropriate.