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Theromanization of Khmer is a representation of theKhmer (Cambodian) language using letters of theLatin alphabet. This is most commonly done with Khmerproper nouns, such as names of people and geographical names, as in agazetteer.

Cambodian geographical names are oftenromanized with atransliteration system, where representations in theKhmer script are mapped regularly to representations in the Latin alphabet (sometimes with some additionaldiacritics). The results do not always reflect standard Khmer pronunciation, as no special treatment is given to unpronounced letters and irregular pronunciations, although the two registers of Khmer vowel symbols are often taken into account.

Whentranscription is used, words are romanized based on their pronunciation. However, pronunciation of Khmer can vary by speaker and region. Roman transcription of Khmer is often donead hoc onInternet forums andchatrooms, the results sometimes being referred to asKhmenglish orKhmerlish. These ad hoc romanizations are usually based onEnglish pronunciations of letters, although they may also be influenced by Khmer spelling (as with the use ofs rather thanh to represent a finalaspirate).

Since some sounds can be represented by more than one symbol in Khmer orthography, it is not generally possible to recover the original Khmer spelling from a pronunciation-based Roman transcription. Even transliteration systems often do not preserve all of the distinctions made in the Khmer script.

Some of the more commonly used romanization systems for Khmer are listed below. For full details of the various systems, see the links given in theExternal Links section.

The Khmer romanization scheme published by the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names is based on the BGN/PCGN system, described below. It is used for Cambodian geographical names in some recent maps and gazetteers, although the Geographic Department's modified system (see below) has come into use in the country since 1995.^[1] Correspondences in the UNGEGN system are detailed in theKhmer alphasyllabary article.

The Geographic Department of the Cambodian Ministry of Land Management and Urban Planning has developed a modified version of the UNGEGN system,^[2] originally put forward in 1995, and used in the second edition of the Gazetteer of Cambodia in 1996. Further modifications were made in 1997, and the system continues to be used in Cambodia.^[1]

The main change made in this system compared with the UNGEGN system is thatdiacritics on vowels are omitted. Some of the vowels are also represented using different letter combinations.

A system used by theUnited States Board on Geographic Names and thePermanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use, published in 1972. It is based on the modified 1959Service Géographique Khmer (SGK) system.^[3]

This system (also called Transliteration System for Khmer Script), from theAmerican Library Association andLibrary of Congress,^[4] romanizes Khmer words using the original Indic values of the Khmer letters, which are often different from their modern values. This can obscure the modern Khmer pronunciation, but the system has the advantage of relative simplicity, and facilitates the etymological reconstruction ofSanskrit andPali loanwords whose pronunciation may be different in modern Khmer. The system is a modification of that proposed byLewitz (1969), and was developed by Franklin Huffman of Cornell University and Edwin Bonsack of the Library of Congress for thelibrary cataloguing of publications in Khmer.

This chart shows in full the three main systems for the romanization of Khmer: UNGEGN (or BGN/PCGN), Geographic Department and ALA-LC:

  1st series  2nd series^{[note 1]}

Various authors have used systems based on theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to transcribe Khmer. One such system is used in the books of Franklin E. Huffman and others;^[5] a more recent scheme is that used in J.M. Filippi's 2004 textbookEveryday Khmer orKhmer au quotidien.^[6] These systems differ in certain respects: for example, Huffman's uses doubling of vowel symbols to indicate long vowels, whereas Filippi's uses the IPAtriangular colon vowel length symbol.

• UNGEGN (PDF - 166kb)
• Geographic Department (PDF)
• ALA-LC (PDF - 1,064kb)
• BGN/PCGN (PDF - 334.49kb)

• Romanization
• Khmer language

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• Articles with short description
• Short description matches Wikidata
• Pages with plain IPA