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 • (1936): Adopted by the International Convention of Orientalist Scholars in Rome. It is the basis for the very influential
Hans Wehr dictionary (). •
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 (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 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 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 •
Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR, 1928–1986, in Taiwan 1945–1986; Taiwan used Japanese Romaji before 1945), •
Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II (MPS II, 1986–2002), •
Tongyong Pinyin (2002–2008), and •
Hanyu Pinyin (since January 1, 2009).
Singapore Cantonese •
Barnett–Chao •
Guangdong (1960) •
Hong Kong Government •
Jyutping •
Macau Government •
Meyer–Wempe •
Sidney Lau •
Yale (1942) •
ILE romanization of Cantonese Wu Min Nan or Hokkien •
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 •
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 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 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 ==Overview and summary==