TheYale romanization of Cantonese was developed byYale scholar Gerard P. Kok for his and Parker Po-fei Huang's textbookSpeak Cantonese initially circulated in looseleaf form in 1952^[1] but later published in 1958.^[2] Unlike theYale romanization of Mandarin, it is still widely used in books and dictionaries, especially for foreign learners ofCantonese. It shares some similarities withHanyu Pinyin in that unvoiced, unaspiratedconsonants are represented by letters traditionally used in English and most other European languages to represent voiced sounds. For example,[p] is represented asb in Yale, whereas its aspirated counterpart,[pʰ] is represented asp.^[3] Students attending theChinese University of Hong Kong's New-Asia Yale-in-China Chinese Language Center are taught using Yale romanization.^[4]

Some enthusiasts employ Yale romanisation to explorewriting Cantonese as an alphabetic language [zh].^{[citation needed]}

• Only the finalsm andng can be used as standalonenasal syllables.

Modern Cantonese has up to seven phonemic tones. Cantonese Yale represents these tones using a combination of diacritics and the letterh.^[5][6] Traditional Chinese linguistics treats the tones in syllables ending with a stop consonant as separate "entering tones". Cantonese Yale follows modern linguistic conventions in treating these the same as the high-flat, mid-flat and low-flat tones, respectively.

Sample transcription of one of the300 Tang Poems byMeng Haoran:

Note concerning the jì in the last line of the poem that it is pronounced as high flat here because immediately followed by a tone that begins high and yet that this Romanization's conventions mark it nonetheless as high falling, and the user then needs to remember this rule of tone-sandhi. (Interested readers can confirm this convention by looking at for instance the dictionary by Kwan Choi Wah among the works in the list at bottom below.)

• Cantonese phonology
• Jyutping
• Guangdong Romanization
• ILE romanization of Cantonese
• Sidney Lau romanisation
• S. L. Wong (phonetic symbols)
• Barnett–Chao Romanisation
• Yale romanization of Mandarin
• Yale romanization of Korean

• Kwan, Choi Wah關彩華 (2000).English-Cantonese Dictionary -英粤字典: Cantonese in Yale Romanization (2nd ed.).Chinese University Press.ISBN 962-201-970-6.
• Matthews, Stephen & Yip, Virginia (1994).Cantonese. A Comprehensive Grammar. Routledge.ISBN 0-415-08945-X.
• Ng Lam, Sim-yuk & Chik, Hon-man (2000).Chinese-English Dictionary漢英小字典: Cantonese in Yale Romanization, Mandarin in Pinyin.Chinese University Press.ISBN 962-201-922-6.

• Comparison chart of Romanization for Cantonese with Yale, S. Lau, Guangdong, Toho and LSHK (uses Shift JIS encoding)
• MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary (supports Cantonese Yale romanization)

• Cantonese romanisation
• Writing systems introduced in 1970
• Languages of Hong Kong

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• Pages with plain IPA
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