Romanization

Methods

• Source, or donor language – A system may be tailored to romanize text from a particular language, or a series of languages, or for any language in a particular writing system. A language-specific system typically preserves language features like pronunciation, while the general one may be better for cataloguing international texts.
• Target, or receiver language – Most systems are intended for an audience that speaks or reads a particular language.
• Simplicity – Since the basic Latin alphabet has a smaller number of letters than many other writing systems, digraphs, diacritics, or special characters must be used to represent them all in Latin script. This affects the ease of creation, digital storage and transmission, reproduction, and reading of the romanized text.
• Reversibility – Whether or not the original can be restored from the converted text. Some reversible systems allow for an irreversible simplified version.

  Transliteration

Transcription

Phonemic

Phonetic

Trade-offs

Romanization of specific writing systems

Arabic

• Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft : Adopted by the International Convention of Orientalist Scholars in Rome. It is the basis for the very influential Hans Wehr dictionary.
• BS 4280 : Developed by the British Standards Institution
• SATTS : A one-for-one substitution system, a legacy from the Morse code era
• UNGEGN
• DIN 31635 : Developed by the Deutsches Institut für Normung
• ISO 233. Transliteration.
• Qalam : A system that focuses upon preserving the spelling, rather than the pronunciation, and uses mixed case
• ISO 233-2 : Simplified transliteration.
• Buckwalter transliteration : Developed at Xerox by Tim Buckwalter; doesn't require unusual diacritics
• ALA-LC
• Arabic chat alphabet

  Persian

Armenian

Georgian

Greek

• ALA-LC
• Beta Code
• Greeklish
• ISO 843

  Hebrew

• ANSI Z39.25
• UNGEGN
• ISO 259 : Transliteration.
• ISO 259-2 : Simplified transliteration.
• ISO/DIS 259-3: Phonemic transcription.
• ALA-LC

  Indic (Brahmic) scripts

• ISO 15919 : 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, 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

  Devanagari–nastaʿlīq (Hindustani)

• In Pakistan: Standard Urdu is the "high" variety, whereas Hindustani is the "low" variety used by the masses.
• In India, both Standard Hindi and Standard Urdu are the "H" varieties, whereas Hindustani is the "L" variety used by the masses and written in either devanagari or nastaʿlīq.

Chinese

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 : 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 : Early standard for international addresses
• Wade–Giles : Transliteration. Very popular from the 19th century until recently and continues to be used by some Western academics.
• Yale : 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

• Hanyu Pinyin : 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.
• ISO 7098 : Based on Hanyu Pinyin.

  Taiwan

1. Gwoyeu Romatzyh,
2. Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II,
3. Tongyong Pinyin, and
4. Hanyu Pinyin.

   Singapore

Cantonese

• Barnett–Chao
• Guangdong
• Hong Kong Government
• Jyutping
• Meyer–Wempe
• Sidney Lau
• Yale
• Cantonese Pinyin

  Min Nan or Hokkien

• Pe̍h-ōe-jī, once the de facto official script of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan. Technically this represented a largely phonemic transcription system, as Min Nan was not commonly written in Chinese.
• * See also Comparison of Hokkien writing systems.

  Teochew

• Guangdong, for the distinct Teochew variety.

  Min Dong

• Foochow Romanized

  Min Bei

• Kienning Colloquial Romanized

  Japanese

• Hepburn : transcription to Anglo-American practices, used in geographical names
• Nihon-shiki : transliteration. Also adopted as in 1989.
• Kunrei-shiki : transliteration. Also adopted as.
• JSL : transcription. Named after the book Japanese: The Spoken Language by Eleanor Jorden.
• ALA-LC: Similar to Modified Hepburn
• Wāpuro: transliteration. Not strictly a system, but a collection of common practices that enables input of Japanese text.

  Korean

• McCune–Reischauer, 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. 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 ’.

• Yale : 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. This system also indicates consonants that have disappeared from a word's South Korean orthography and standard pronunciation.
• Revised Romanization of Korean : Includes rules both for transcription and for transliteration. South Korea now officially uses this system that 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, ㅋ/ㄱ, ㅊ/ㅈ and ㅍ/ㅂ. 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 : This actually is two different standards under one name: one for North Korea and the other for South Korea. 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.
• Lukoff romanization, developed 1945–47 for his Spoken Korean coursebooks

  Philippine languages

Thai

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

  Cyrillic

Belarusian

• BGN/PCGN romanization of Belarusian, 1979
• Scientific transliteration, or the International Scholarly System for linguistics
• ALA-LC romanization, 1997 :
• ISO 9:1995
• Instruction on transliteration of Belarusian geographical names with letters of Latin script, 2000

  Bulgarian