The Yale romanizations are four systems created at Yale University for romanizing the four East Asian languages of Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, and Japanese. The Yale romanization for Mandarin was created during World War II for use by United States military personnel, while the Yale romanization systems for the other three languages were created later, in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mandarin Yale was developed in 1943 by George Kennedy to help prepare American soldiers to communicate with their Chinese allies on the battlefield. Rather than try to teach recruits to interpret the standard romanization of the time, the Wade-Giles system, a new system was invented that utilized the decoding skills that recruits would already know from having learned to read English, i.e. it used English spelling conventions to represent Chinese sounds.

It avoided the main problems that the Wade-Giles system presented to the uninitiated student or news announcer trying to get somebody's name right in a public forum, because it did not use the "rough breathing (aspiration) mark" (which looks like an apostrophe) to distinguish between sounds like jee and chee. In Wade-Giles the first of those would be written chi and the second would be written ch'i. In the Yale romanization they were written ji and chi. The Yale system also avoids the difficulties faced by the beginner trying to read pinyin romanization, which uses certain Roman letters and combinations of letters in such a way that they no longer carry their expected values.