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Languages can be romanized in a variety of ways, as shown here with Mandarin Chinese

In linguistics, romanization or latinization (or romanisation/latinisation: see spelling differences) is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system (or none). Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and transcription, for representing the spoken word. The latter can be subdivided into phonemic transcription, which records the phonemes or units of semantic meaning in speech, and more strict phonetic transcription, which records speech sounds with precision. Each romanization has its own set of rules for pronunciation of the romanized words.

Methods of romanization[link]

Transliteration[link]

If the romanization attempts to transliterate the original script, the guiding principle is a one-to-one mapping of characters in the source language into the target script, with less emphasis on how the result sounds when pronounced according to the reader's language. For example, the Nihon-shiki romanization of Japanese allows the informed reader to reconstruct the original Japanese kana syllables with 100% accuracy, but requires additional knowledge for correct pronunciation.

Transcription[link]

Phonemic[link]

Most romanizations are intended to enable the casual reader who is unfamiliar with the original script to pronounce the source language reasonably accurately. Such romanizations follow the principle of phonemic transcription and attempt to render the significant sounds (phonemes) of the original as faithfully as possible in the target language. The popular Hepburn romanization of Japanese is an example of a transcriptive romanization designed for English speakers.

Phonetic[link]

A phonetic conversion goes one step further and attempts to depict all phones in the source language, sacrificing legibility if necessary by using characters or conventions not found in the target script. In practice such a representation almost never tries to represent every possible allophone—especially those that occur naturally due to coarticulation effects—and instead limits itself to the most significant allophonic distinctions. The International Phonetic Alphabet is the most common system of phonetic transcription.

Tradeoffs[link]

For most language pairs, building a usable romanization involves tradeoffs between the two extremes. Pure transcriptions are generally not possible, as the source language usually contains sounds and distinctions not found in the target language, but which must be shown for the romanized form to be comprehensible. Furthermore due to diachronic and synchronic variance no written language represents any spoken language with perfect accuracy and the vocal interpretation of a script may vary by a great degree among languages. In modern times the chain of transcription is usually spoken foreign language, written foreign language, written native language, spoken (read) native language. Reducing the number of those processes, i.e. removing one or both steps of writing, usually leads to more accurate oral articulations. In general, outside a limited audience of scholars romanizations tend to lean more towards transcription. As an example, consider the Japanese martial art 柔術: the Nihon-shiki romanization zyûzyutu may allow someone who knows Japanese to reconstruct the kana syllables じゅうじゅつ, but most native English speakers or rather readers would find it easier to guess the pronunciation from the Hepburn version, jūjutsu.

Romanization of specific writing systems[link]

Arabic[link]

The Arabic alphabet is used to write Arabic, Persian, and Urdu as well as numerous other languages in the Muslim world, particularly African and Asian languages without alphabets of their own. Romanization standards include the following:

• Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft (1936): Adopted by the International Convention of Orientalist Scholars in Rome. It is the basis for the very influential Hans Wehr dictionary (ISBN 0-87950-003-4).^[1]
• BS 4280 (1968): Developed by the British Standards Institution [1]
• SATTS (1970s): A one-for-one substitution system, a legacy from the Morse code era
• UNGEGN (1972): [2]
• DIN-31635 (1982): Developed by the Deutsches Institut für Normung (German Institute for Standardization)
• ISO 233 (1984). Transliteration.
• Qalam (1985): A system that focuses upon preserving the spelling, rather than the pronunciation, and uses mixed case [3]
• ISO 233-2 (1993). Simplified transliteration.
• Buckwalter Transliteration (1990s): Developed at Xerox by Tim Buckwalter [4]; doesn't require unusual diacritics [5]
• ALA-LC (1997): [6]
• Arabic Chat Alphabet

Armenian[link]

Georgian[link]

Greek[link]

There are romanization systems for both Modern and Ancient Greek.

• ISO 843 (1997): [7]
• ALA-LC: [8]
• Beta code: [9]
• Greeklish

Persian[link]

Hebrew[link]

The Hebrew alphabet is romanized using several standards:

• ANSI Z39.25 (1975):
• UNGEGN (1977): [10]
• ISO 259 (1984): Transliteration.
• ISO 259-2 (1994): Simplified transliteration.
• ISO/DIS 259-3: Phonemic transcription.
• ALA-LC: [11]

Brahmic (Indic) scripts[link]

The Brahmic family of abugidas is used for languages of the Indian subcontinent and south-east Asia. There is a long tradition in the west to study Sanskrit and other Indic texts in Latin transliteration. Various transliteration conventions have been used for Indic scripts since the time of Sir William Jones. A comparison of some of them is provided here: [12]

• ISO 15919 (2001): A standard transliteration convention was codified in the ISO 15919 standard. It uses diacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmic consonants and vowels to the Latin script. See also Transliteration of Indic scripts: how to use ISO 15919. The Devanagari-specific portion is very similar to the academic standard, IAST: "International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration", and to the United States Library of Congress standard, ALA-LC: [13], although there are a few differences
• The National Library at Kolkata romanization, intended for the romanization of all Indic scripts, is an extension of IAST
• Harvard-Kyoto: Uses upper and lower case and doubling of letters, to avoid the use of diacritics, and to restrict the range to 7-bit ASCII.
• ITRANS: a transliteration scheme into 7-bit ASCII created by Avinash Chopde that used to be prevalent on Usenet.
• ISCII (1988)

Chinese[link]

Romanization of the Chinese language, in particular, has proved a very difficult problem, although the issue is further complicated by political considerations. Because of this, many romanization tables contain Chinese characters plus one or more romanizations or Zhuyin.

Mandarin[link]

• ALA-LC: Used to be similar to Wade-Giles [14], but converted to Hanyu Pinyin in 2000 [15]
• EFEO. Developed by Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient in 19th century, used mainly in France.
• Latinxua Sinwenz (1926): Omitted tone sounds. Used mainly in the Soviet Union and Xinjiang in the 30s. Predecessor of Hanyu Pinyin.
• Lessing-Othmer: Used mainly in Germany.
• Chinese Postal Map Romanization (1906): Early standard for international addresses
• Wade-Giles (1912): Transliteration. Very popular from 19th century until recently and continues to be used by some Western academics.
• Yale (1942): Created by the U.S. for battlefield communication and used in the influential Yale textbooks.
• Legge romanization: Created by James Legge a Scottish missionary.

Mainland China[link]

• Hanyu Pinyin (1958): In mainland China, Hanyu Pinyin has been used officially to romanize Mandarin for decades, primarily as a linguistic tool for teaching the standardized language. The system is also used in other Chinese-speaking areas such as Singapore and parts of Taiwan, and has been adopted by much of the international community as a standard for writing Chinese words and names in the Latin script. The value of Hanyu Pinyin in education in China lies in the fact that China, like any other populated area with comparable area and population, has numerous distinct dialects, though there is just one common written language and one common standardized spoken form. (These comments apply to Romanization in general)
• ISO 7098 (1991): Based on Hanyu Pinyin.

Taiwan[link]

1. Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR, 1928–1986, in Taiwan 1945–1986; Taiwan used Japanese Romaji before 1945),
2. Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II (MPS II, 1986–2002),
3. Tongyong Pinyin (2002–2008),^[2][3] and
4. Hanyu Pinyin (since January 1, 2009).^[4][5]

Singapore[link]

Cantonese[link]

• Barnett-Chao
• Guangdong (1960)
• Hong Kong Government
• Jyutping
• Meyer-Wempe
• Sidney Lau
• Yale (1942)
• Cantonese Pinyin

Min Nan[link]

• Pe̍h-oē-jī (POJ), once the de facto official script of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (since the late 19th century). Technically this represented a largely phonemic transcription system, as Min Nan was not commonly written in Chinese.
• Guangdong (1960), for the distinct Teochow variety.

Min Dong[link]

• Foochow Romanized

Japanese[link]

Romanization (or, more generally, Roman letters) is called "rōmaji" in Japanese. The most common systems are:

• Hepburn (1867): transcription to Anglo-American practices, used in geographical names
• Nihon-shiki (1885): transliteration. Also adopted as (ISO 3602 Strict) in 1989.
• Kunrei-shiki (1937): transliteration. Also adopted as (ISO 3602).
• JSL (1987)
• ALA-LC: Similar to Hepburn [16]
• Wāpuro: ("word processor romanization") transliteration. Not strictly a system, but a collection of common practices that enables input of Japanese text.

Korean[link]

While romanization has taken various and at times seemingly unstructured forms, some sets of rules do exist:

• McCune-Reischauer (MR; 1937?), the first transcription to gain some acceptance. A slightly changed version of MR was the official system for Korean in South Korea from 1984 to 2000, and yet a different modification is still the official system in North Korea. Uses breves, apostrophes and diereses, the latter two indicating orthographic syllable boundaries in cases that would otherwise be ambiguous.
  What is called MR may in many cases be any of a number of systems that differ from each other and from the original MR mostly in whether word endings are separated from the stem by a space, a hyphen or – according to McCune's and Reischauer's system – not at all; and if a hyphen or space is used, whether sound change is reflected in a stem's last and an ending's first consonant letter (e.g. pur-i vs. pul-i). Although mostly irrelevant when transcribing uninflected words, these aberrations are so widespread that any mention of "McCune-Reischauer romanization" may not necessarily refer to the original system as published in the 1930s.
  • There is, for example, the ALA-LC / U.S. Library of Congress system, based on MR but with some deviations. Word division is addressed in detail, with a generous use of spaces to separate word endings from stems that is not seen in MR. Syllables of given names are always separated with a hyphen, which is expressly never done by MR. Sound changes are ignored more often than in MR. Distinguishes between ‘ and ’. [17]

Several problems with MR led to the development of the newer systems:

• Yale (1942): This system has become the established standard romanization for Korean among linguists. Vowel length in old or dialectal pronunciation is indicated by a macron. In cases that would otherwise be ambiguous, orthographic syllable boundaries are indicated with a period. Indicates disappearance of consonants.
• Revised Romanization of Korean (RR; 2000): Includes rules both for transcription and for transliteration. South Korea now officially uses this system which was approved in 2000. Road signs and textbooks were required to follow these rules as soon as possible, at a cost estimated by the government to be at least US$20 million. All road signs, names of railway and subway stations on line maps and signs etc. have been changed. The change has been either ignored or grandfathered in some cases, notably the romanization of names and existing companies. RR is generally similar to MR, but uses no diacritics or apostrophes, and uses distinct letters for ㅌ/ㄷ (t/d), ㅋ/ㄱ (k/g), ㅊ/ㅈ (ch/j) and ㅍ/ㅂ (p/b). In cases of ambiguity, orthographic syllable boundaries were intended to be indicated with a hyphen, but this is inconsistently applied in practice.
• ISO/TR 11941 (1996): This actually is two different standards under one name: one for North Korea (DPRK) and the other for South Korea (ROK). The initial submission to the ISO was based heavily on Yale and was a joint effort between both states, but they could not agree on the final draft. A superficial comparison between the two is available here: [18]
• Lukoff romanization, developed 1945–47 for his Spoken Korean coursebooks [19]

Vietnamese[link]

Thai[link]

Thai, spoken in Thailand and some areas of Laos, Burma and China, is written with its own script, probably descended from mixture of Tai–Laotian and Old Khmer, in the Brahmic family. Also see Thai alphabet.

• Royal Thai General System of Transcription:
• ALA-LC: [20]
• ISO 11940 (1998): Transliteration

Cyrillic[link]

In English-language library catalogues, bibliographies, and most academic publications, the Library of Congress transliteration method is used worldwide.

In linguistics, scientific transliteration is used for both Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets. This applies to Old Church Slavonic, as well as modern Slavic languages which use these alphabets.

Belarusian[link]

• BGN/PCGN romanization of Belarusian, 1979 (United States Board on Geographic Names and Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use)
• Scientific transliteration, or the International Scholarly System for linguistics
• ALA-LC romanization, 1997 (American Library Association and Library of Congress): [21]
• ISO 9:1995
• Instruction on transliteration of Belarusian geographical names with letters of Latin script, 2000

See also: Belarusian Latin alphabet

Bulgarian[link]

A system based on scientific transliteration and ISO/R 9:1968 was considered official in Bulgaria since the 1970s. Since the late 1990s, Bulgarian authorities have switched to a new system avoiding the use of diacritics and optimized for compatibility with English. This system became mandatory for public use with a law passed in 2009.^[6] Where the old system uses <č,š,ž,št,j,ă>, the new system uses <ch,sh,zh,sht,y,a>.

Different transliteration standards are in use at the US Board on Geographic Names (BGN) and the UK Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use (PCGN), as well as the US Library of Congress (ALA-LC Romanization). These English-based systems agree with the new official system in the use of <ch,sh,zh,sht>, but differ in their treatment of some vowel letters.

Kyrgyz[link]

Macedonian[link]

Russian[link]

There is no single universally accepted system of writing Russian using the Latin script — in fact there are a huge number of such systems: some are adjusted for a particular target language (e.g. German or French), some are designed as a librarian's transliteration, some are prescribed for Russian travellers' passports; the transcription of some names is purely traditional.   All this has resulted in great reduplication of names.   E.g. the name of the Russian composer Tchaikovsky may also be written as Tchaykovsky, Tchajkovskij, Tchaikowski, Tschaikowski, Czajkowski, Čajkovskij, Čajkovski, Chajkovskij, Çaykovski, Chaykovsky, Chaykovskiy, Chaikovski, Tshaikovski, Tšaikovski, Tsjajkovskij etc. Systems include:

• BGN/PCGN (1947): Transliteration system (United States Board on Geographic Names & Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use). [22]
• GOST 16876-71 (1971): A now defunct Soviet transliteration standard. Replaced by GOST 7.79, which is an ISO 9 equivalent.
• United Nations romanization system for geographical names (1987): Based on GOST 16876-71.
• ISO 9 (1995): Transliteration. From the International Organization for Standardization.
• ALA-LC (1997): [23]
• "Volapuk" encoding (1990s): Slang term (it's not really Volapük) for a writing method that's not truly a transliteration, but used for similar goals (see article).
• Conventional English transliteration is based to BGN/PCGN, but doesn't follow a particular standard. Described in detail at transliteration of Russian into English.
• Streamlined system for the transliteration of Russian
• Comparative transliteration of Russian in different languages (Western European, Arabic, Georgian, Braille, Morse)

Ukrainian[link]

Ukrainian personal names are usually transcribed phonetically; see the main article section Conventional romanization of proper names. The Ukrainian National system is used for geographic names in Ukraine.

• ALA-LC: (PDF).
• ISO 9
• Ukrainian National transliteration: (JPEG, in Ukrainian).
• Ukrainian National and BGN/PCGN systems, at the UN Working Group on Romanization Systems: (PDF).
• Thomas T. Pedersen's comparison of five systems: (PDF).

See also: Ukrainian Latin alphabet

Overview and summary[link]

The chart below shows the most common phonemic transcription romanization used for several different alphabets. While it is sufficient for many casual users, there are multiple alternatives used for each alphabet, and many exceptions. For details, consult each of the language sections below. (Hangul characters are broken down into jamo components.)

See also[link]

• Anglicisation
• Gairaigo
• Francization
• Latinisation (literature)
• Cyrillization, expression of a language in Cyrillic letters

References[link]

External links[link]

• Unicode Transliteration Guidelines
• UNGEGN Working Group on Romanization Systems
• U.S. Library of Congress Romanization Tables in PDF format
• Download IPA for Urdu and Roman Urdu for Mobile and Internet Users
• One of the few printed books with lists of romanizations is ALA-LC Romanization Tables, Randall Barry (ed.), U.S. Library of Congress, 1997, ISBN 0-8444-0940-5.
• Microsoft Transliteration Utility – A tool for creating, debugging and using transliteration modules from any script to any other script.
• eiktub – An Arabic Transliteration Pad
• Chinese Phonetic Conversion Tool – Converts between Pinyin and other formats
• Lingua::Translit – Perl module and online service covering a variety of writing systems e.g. Cyrillic or Greek. Provides a lot of standards as well as common transliteration schemes.