Inlinguistics,romanization orromanisation is the conversion of text from a differentwriting system to theRoman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization includetransliteration, for representing written text, andtranscription, for representing the spoken word, and combinations of both. Transcription methods can be subdivided intophonemic transcription, which records thephonemes or units ofsemantic meaning in speech, and more strictphonetic transcription, which records speech sounds with precision.
There are many consistent orstandardized romanization systems. They can be classified by their characteristics. A particular system's characteristics may make it better-suited for various, sometimes contradictory applications, including document retrieval, linguistic analysis, easy readability, faithful representation of pronunciation.
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. (So-calledinternational romanization systems for Cyrillic text are based on central-European alphabets like theCzech andCroatian alphabet.)
Simplicity – Since the basicLatin 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.
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, theNihon-shiki romanization ofJapanese allows the informed reader to reconstruct the original Japanesekana syllables with 100% accuracy, but requires additional knowledge for correct pronunciation.
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 ofphonemic transcription and attempt to render the significant sounds (phonemes) of the original as faithfully as possible in the target language. The popularHepburn Romanization of Japanese is an example of a transcriptive romanization designed for English speakers.
Aphonetic conversion goes one step further and attempts to depict allphones 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 representevery possible allophone—especially those that occur naturally due tocoarticulation effects—and instead limits itself to the most significant allophonic distinctions. TheInternational Phonetic Alphabet is the most common system of phonetic transcription.
For most language pairs, building a usable romanization involves a trade-off 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 todiachronic andsynchronic variance nowritten language represents anyspoken language with perfect accuracy and the vocal interpretation of ascript 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 romanizationzyûzyutu 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.
TheArabic script is used to writeArabic,Persian,Urdu,Pashto andSindhi as well as numerous other languages in the Muslim world, particularlyAfrican andAsian languages without alphabets of their own. Romanization standards include the following:
^abcHamzeh and eyn are not transliterated at the beginning of words.
^abcdThe dot below may be used instead of cedilla.
^At the beginning of words the combination⟨خو⟩ was pronounced/xw/ or/xʷ/ in Classical Persian. In modern varieties the glide/ʷ/ has been lost, though the spelling has not been changed. It may be still heard in Dari as a relict pronunciation. The combination/xʷa/ was changed to/xo/ (see below).
TheBrahmic family ofabugidas is used for languages of the Indian subcontinent and south-east Asia. There is a long tradition in the west to studySanskrit and other Indic texts in Latin transliteration. Various transliteration conventions have been used for Indic scripts since the time of Sir William Jones.[13]
ISO 15919 (2001): A standardtransliteration convention was codified in the ISO 15919 standard. It usesdiacritics to map the much larger set of Brahmicconsonants andvowels 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,[14] although there are a few differences
In Pakistan: Standard (Saaf or Khaalis) Urdu is the "high" variety, whereas Hindustani is the "low" variety used by the masses (called Urdu, written innastaʿlīq script).
In India, both Standard (Shuddh) Hindi and Standard (Saaf or Khaalis) Urdu are the "H" varieties (written indevanagari 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-basedopen source collaboration is impossible among devanagari and nastaʿlīq readers.
Initiated in 2011, the Hamari Boli Initiative[15] is a full-scale open-sourcelanguage 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.[16]
Romanization of theSinitic languages, particularlyMandarin, 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 orZhuyin.
Hanyu Pinyin (1958): Inmainland China, Hanyu Pinyin has been used officially to romanizeMandarin for decades, primarily as a linguistic tool for teaching the standardized language. The system is also used in other Chinese-speaking areas such asSingapore and parts ofTaiwan, 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 distinctdialects, though there is just one common written language and one common standardized spoken form. (These comments apply to romanization in general)
Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ), once thede facto official script of thePresbyterian Church in Taiwan (since the late 19th century). Technically this represented a largely phonemic transcription system, asMin Nan was not commonly written in Chinese.
Wāpuro: ("word processor romanization") transliteration. Not strictly a system, but a collection of common practices that enables input of Japanese text.
TheNuosu language, spoken in southern China, is written with its own script, theYi script. The only existing romanization system isYYPY (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.
A system based onscientific transliteration andISO/R 9:1968 was considered official in Bulgaria since the 1970s. Since the late 1990s, Bulgarian authorities have switched to the so-calledStreamlined 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.[26] Where the old system uses <č,š,ž,št,c,j,ă>, the new system uses <ch,sh,zh,sht,ts,y,a>.
The new Bulgarian system was endorsed for official use also by UN in 2012,[27] and byBGN andPCGN in 2013.[28]
There is no single universally accepted system of writingRussian 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 composerTchaikovsky may also be written asTchaykovsky,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).[29]
GOST 16876-71 (1971): A now defunct Soviet transliteration standard. Replaced by GOST 7.79, which is anISO 9 equivalent.
"Volapuk" encoding (1990s): Slang term (it is not reallyVolapük) 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 atRomanization of Russian.
The Latin script for Syriac was developed in the 1930s, following the state policy for minority languages of theSoviet Union, with some material published.[37]
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.
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 above. (Hangul characters are broken down intojamo components.)
^The News International - Dec 29, 2011Archived June 16, 2013, at theWayback Machine – "Hamari Boli (our language) is perhaps one of the very first serious undertakings to explore, develop and encourage the growth of Roman script in the use of Urdu/Hindi language."
Microsoft Transliteration Utility – A tool for creating, debugging and using transliteration modules from any script to any other script.
Randall Barry (ed.)ALA-LC Romanization Tables U.S. Library of Congress, 1997,ISBN0-8444-0940-5. (One of the few printed books with lists of romanizations)
Lingua::Translit –Perl module covering a variety of writing systems e.g. Cyrillic or Greek. Provides a lot of standards as well as common transliteration schemes.
Arabeasy – Arabic Transliteration (free chrome extension exists, also works for Persian, Urdu)