Romanization

In linguistics, romanization or romanisation is the process of changing text from a different writing system into the Roman (Latin) script. This helps people read and understand languages that use letters or symbols not found in the Roman alphabet.

There are different ways to do romanization. One common method is called transliteration, which focuses on showing the written words as closely as possible. Another method is transcription, which tries to capture how words sound when spoken. Transcription can be done in two ways: phonemic transcription, which looks at the meaning units of speech, and phonetic transcription, which records every small sound very precisely.

Romanization is important because it makes it easier for people who only know the Roman alphabet to read and study other languages. It is used in many books, maps, and computer systems around the world.

Methods

There are many ways to change text from one writing system into the Roman (Latin) alphabet. These methods can be chosen based on what they are needed for, like making text easy to read or keeping the original sounds.

• Source language: Some methods work best for one language, keeping its special sounds. Others work for many languages.
• Target language: Most methods are made for people who speak a certain language.
• Simplicity: The Latin alphabet has fewer letters than many others, so extra symbols are needed to show all sounds.
• Reversibility: Some methods let you go back to the original text, while others do not.

Transliteration

Main article: Transliteration

Transliteration tries to change each symbol from the original script to the Latin alphabet, focusing on the symbols rather than how they sound. For example, a system for Japanese can let someone reconstruct the original Japanese symbols correctly.

Transcription

Main article: Transcription (linguistics)

Phonemic

See also: Phonemic orthography

Most romanizations help people who don’t know the original script say the words right. They try to show the main sounds of the original language. The Hepburn system for Japanese is made to help English speakers say words correctly.

Phonetic

See also: Phonetic transcription

A phonetic method tries to show every sound in the original language, even if it makes the writing harder to read. The International Phonetic Alphabet is a common way to do this.

Compromise

For most languages, making a good romanization means finding a balance. Pure transcription isn’t usually possible because languages have sounds that others don’t. Most romanizations today try to help people say words right, rather than just showing the symbols. For example, the Japanese word 柔術 is written as zyûzyutu in one system, but most English readers would find jūjutsu easier to say.

Romanization of specific writing systems

See also: Category:Romanization

Arabic

The Arabic script is used to write Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Pashto and Sindhi 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:

Arabic

• 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).
• BS 4280 (1968): Developed by the British Standards Institution
• SATTS (1970s): A one-for-one substitution system, a legacy from the Morse code era
• UNGEGN (1972)
• 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
• ISO 233-2 (1993): Simplified transliteration.
• Buckwalter transliteration (1990s): Developed at Xerox by Tim Buckwalter; does not require unusual diacritics
• ALA-LC (1997)
• Arabic chat alphabet

Persian

See also: Category:Persian orthography

Notes:

Armenian

Georgian

Notes:

Greek

There are romanization systems for both Modern and Ancient Greek.

• ALA-LC
• Beta Code
• Greeklish
• ISO 843 (1997)

Hebrew

The Hebrew alphabet is romanized using several standards:

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

Indic (Brahmic) scripts

See also: Devanagari transliteration, Romanization of Bengali, and Romanisation of Malayalam

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.

• 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. 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, 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)

Devanagari–nastaʿlīq (Hindustani)

Hindustani is an Indo-Aryan language with extreme digraphia and diglossia resulting from the Hindi–Urdu controversy starting in the 1800s. Technically, Hindustani itself is recognized by neither the language community nor any governments. Two standardized registers, Standard Hindi and Standard Urdu, are recognized as official languages in India and Pakistan. However, in practice the situation is,

• In Pakistan: Standard (Saaf or Khaalis) Urdu is the "high" variety, whereas Hindustani is the "low" variety used by the masses (called Urdu, written in nastaʿlīq script).
• In India, both Standard (Shuddh) Hindi and Standard (Saaf or Khaalis) Urdu are the "H" varieties (written in devanagari and nastaʿlīq respectively), whereas Hindustani is the "L" variety used by the masses and written in either devanagari or nastaʿlīq (and called 'Hindi' or 'Urdu' respectively).

The digraphia renders any work in either script largely inaccessible to users of the other script, though otherwise Hindustani is a perfectly mutually intelligible language, essentially meaning that any kind of text-based open source collaboration is impossible among devanagari and nastaʿlīq readers.

Initiated in 2011, the Hamari Boli Initiative is a full-scale open-source language planning initiative aimed at Hindustani script, style, status & lexical reform and modernization. One of primary stated objectives of Hamari Boli is to relieve Hindustani of the crippling devanagari–nastaʿlīq digraphia by way of romanization.

Chinese

Romanization of the Sinitic languages, particularly Mandarin, 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

• ALA-LC: Used to be similar to Wade–Giles, but converted to Hanyu Pinyin in 2000
• EFEO. Developed by École française d'Extrême-Orient in the 19th century, used mainly in France.
• Latinxua Sin Wenz (1926): Omitted tone sounds. Used mainly in the Soviet Union and Xinjiang in the 1930s. Predecessor of Hanyu Pinyin.
• Lessing-Othmer: Used mainly in Germany.
• Postal romanization (1906): Early standard for international addresses
• Wade–Giles (1892): Transliteration. Very popular from the 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.

China

• Hanyu Pinyin (1958): In 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 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

Main article: Chinese language romanization in Taiwan

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), and
4. Hanyu Pinyin (since January 1, 2009).

Singapore

Main article: Chinese language romanisation in Singapore

Cantonese

• Barnett–Chao
• Guangdong (1960)
• Hong Kong Government
• Jyutping
• Macau Government
• Meyer–Wempe
• Sidney Lau
• Yale (1942)
• ILE romanization of Cantonese

Wu

See also: Romanization of Wu Chinese

Min Nan or Hokkien

See also: Comparison of Hokkien writing systems

• Pe̍h-ōe-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.
• Tâi-uân Lô-má-jī Phing-im Hong-àn

Teochew

• Guangdong (1960), for the distinct Teochew variety.

Min Dong

• Foochow Romanized

Min Bei

• Kienning Colloquial Romanized

Japanese

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

• Hepburn (1867): phonetic transcription to Anglo-American practices, used in geographical names
• Nihon-shiki (1885): transliteration. Also adopted as (ISO 3602 Strict) in 1989.
• Kunrei-shiki (1937): phonemic transcription. Also adopted as (ISO 3602).
• JSL (1987): phonemic transcription. Named after the book Japanese: The Spoken Language by Eleanor Jorden.
• ALA-LC: Similar to Modified Hepburn
• Wāpuro: ("word processor romanization") transliteration. Not strictly a system, but a collection of common practices that enables input of Japanese text.

Korean

The following systems are currently the most widely used:

• McCune–Reischauer ("MR"; 1939): Basis for various romanization systems. Almost universally used by international academic journals on Korean studies.
  • Romanization of Korean (1992): The official romanization in North Korea, with some differences from the original MR.
  • The ALA-LC system is based on but deviates from MR.
  • South Korea formerly used yet another modified version of MR as its official system from 1984 to 2000.
• Revised Romanization of Korean (2000): South Korea's official romanization system.
• Yale romanization of Korean (1942): Standard for almost exclusively international linguists.

Thai

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.

• Royal Thai General System of Transcription
• ISO 11940 1998 Transliteration
• ISO 11940-2 2007 Transcription
• ALA-LC

Nuosu

The Nuosu language, spoken in southern China, is written with its own script, the Yi script. The only existing romanization system is YYPY (Yi Yu Pin Yin), which represents tone with letters attached to the end of syllables, as Nuosu forbids codas. It does not use diacritics, and as such due to the large phonemic inventory of Nuosu, it requires frequent use of digraphs, including for monophthong vowels.

Tibetan

The Tibetan script has two official romanization systems: Tibetan Pinyin (for Lhasa Tibetan) and Roman Dzongkha (for Dzongkha).

Cyrillic

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 that use these alphabets.

Belarusian

See also: Belarusian Latin alphabet

• 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):
• ISO 9:1995
• Instruction on transliteration of Belarusian geographical names with letters of Latin script, 2000

Bulgarian

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 the so-called Streamlined 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. Where the old system uses , the new system uses .

The new Bulgarian system was endorsed for official use also by UN in 2012, and by BGN and PCGN in 2013.

Kyrgyz

Macedonian

Russian

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).
• 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)
• "Volapuk" encoding (1990s): Slang term (it is not really Volapük) for a writing method that is not truly a transliteration, but used for similar goals (see article).
• Conventional English transliteration is based to BGN/PCGN, but does not follow a particular standard. Described in detail at Romanization of Russian.
• Streamlined System for the romanization of Russian.
• Comparative transliteration of Russian in different languages (Western European, Arabic, Georgian, Braille, Morse)

Syriac

Main article: Syriac alphabet § Latin alphabet and romanization

The Latin script for Syriac was developed in the 1930s, following the state policy for minority languages of the Soviet Union, with some material published.

Ukrainian

See also: Ukrainian Latin alphabet

The 2010 Ukrainian National system has been adopted by the UNGEGN in 2012 and by the BGN/PCGN in 2020. It is also very close to the modified (simplified) ALA-LC system, which has remained unchanged since 1941.

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

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Overview and summary

The chart below shows the most common ways to change spoken sounds into Roman letters for many different alphabets. This works well for many people, but there are other ways to do it, and some letters don’t always follow the same rules. For more information, look at the sections for each language above. (Hangul characters are broken down into jamo pieces.)