Romanization

A Romanization is a system for representing text in a language that is using a writing system other than the Roman alphabet (e.g. Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK)) into the Roman alphabet. Three methods may be used to carry out Romanization: transliteration, transcription and phonemic conversion[?]. Each Romanization has its own set of rules for pronunciation of the Romanized words.

To Romanize is to transcribe or transliterate a language into the Roman alphabet.

Chinese language

Some languages have more than one system of Romanization; Mandarin, for example, has several, including Wade-Giles, Yale[?], and the now official pinyin; and Cantonese has Jyutping[?], penkyamp, and Yale[?].

In China, a Roman alphabet-based system called pinyin, has been used officially for decades, primarily as a linguistic tool for teaching the official Mandarin language to Chinese whose mother tongue[?] is not Mandarin. The Roman alphabet is used to commonalise the pronunciation of Mandarin words, since the Han characters describe only things and concepts, and provide no pronunciation information. In a country with 1.2 billion people, China has literally hundreds of distinct dialects, though all literate people read Han Chinese characters.

Japanese language

Romanization in Japanese is called "Romaji". Common systems include Hepburn and Kunrei-shiki systems. ISO 3602 is a system approved by ISO.