The romanization of Khmer is a representation of the Khmer (Cambodian) language using letters of the

Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and th ...

. This is most commonly done with Khmer

proper noun A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity (''Africa'', ''Jupiter'', '' Sarah'', ''Microsoft)'' as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities (''continent, ...

s, such as names of people and geographical names, as in a

gazetteer A gazetteer is a geographical index or directory used in conjunction with a map or atlas.Aurousseau, 61. It typically contains information concerning the geographical makeup, social statistics and physical features of a country, region, or con ...

Romanization systems for Khmer

Cambodian geographical names are often romanized with a

transliteration Transliteration is a type of conversion of a text from one script to another that involves swapping letters (thus ''trans-'' + '' liter-'') in predictable ways, such as Greek → , Cyrillic → , Greek → the digraph , Armenian → or L ...

system, where representations in the

Khmer script Khmer script ( km, អក្សរខ្មែរ, )Huffman, Franklin. 1970. ''Cambodian System of Writing and Beginning Reader''. Yale University Press. . is an abugida (alphasyllabary) script used to write the Khmer language, the official la ...

are mapped regularly to representations in the Latin alphabet (sometimes with some additional

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...

s). 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. When transcription 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 done

ad hoc Ad hoc is a Latin phrase meaning literally 'to this'. In English, it typically signifies a solution for a specific purpose, problem, or task rather than a generalized solution adaptable to collateral instances. (Compare with '' a priori''.) C ...

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and

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, the results sometimes being referred to as ''Khmenglish'' or ''Khmerlish''. These ad hoc romanizations are usually based on English pronunciations of letters, although they may also be influenced by Khmer spelling (as with the use of ''s'' rather than ''h'' to represent a final aspirate). 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 the

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section.

UNGEGN

The Khmer romanization scheme published by the

United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (UNGEGN) is one of the nine expert groups of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and deals with the national and international standardization of geographical names. Ev ...

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.Report on the Current Status of United Nations Romanization Systems for Geographical Names – Khmer
UNGEGN Working Group on Romanization Systems, September 2013 (linked fro
WGRS website
. Correspondences in the UNGEGN system are detailed in the Khmer alphasyllabary article.

Geographic Department

The Geographic Department of the Cambodian Ministry of Land Management and Urban Planning has developed a modified version of the UNGEGN system, 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. The main change made in this system compared with the UNGEGN system is that

s on vowels are omitted. Some of the vowels are also represented using different letter combinations.

BGN/PCGN

A system used by the United States Board on Geographic Names and the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use, published in 1972. It is based on the modified 1959 ''Service Géographique Khmer'' (SGK) system.

ALA-LC Romanization Tables

This system (also called Transliteration System for Khmer Script), from the

American Library Association The American Library Association (ALA) is a nonprofit organization based in the United States that promotes libraries and library education internationally. It is the oldest and largest library association in the world, with 49,727 members ...

and

Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library ...

, romanizes Khmer words using the original Indic values of the Khmer letters, which are totally 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 of

Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...

and

Pali Pali () is a Middle Indo-Aryan liturgical language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is widely studied because it is the language of the Buddhist ''Pāli Canon'' or '' Tipiṭaka'' as well as the sacred language of '' Theravāda'' Buddh ...

loanwords whose pronunciation may be different in modern Khmer. The system is a modification of that proposed by Lewitz (1969), and was developed by Franklin Huffman of Cornell University and Edwin Bonsack of the Library of Congress for the library cataloguing of publications in Khmer.

Example words written in each romanization system

Tables of romanization systems

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

Consonants

1st series 2nd seriesKhmer consonants belong to two classes that dictate the value of dependent vowels.

Dependent vowels

Independent vowels

International Phonetic Alphabet transcription

Various authors have used systems based on the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation ...

(IPA) to transcribe Khmer. One such system is used in the books of Franklin E. Huffman and others; a more recent scheme is that used in J.M. Filippi's 2004 textbook ''Everyday Khmer'' or ''Khmer au quotidien''.Jean Michel Filippi, ''Everyday Khmer'', Funan, Phnom Penh , 2004. French edition: Filippi et al., ''Khmer au quotidien'', Librairie You-Feng, 2008. These systems differ in certain respects: for example, Huffman's uses doubling of vowel symbols to indicate long vowels, whereas Filippi's uses the IPA triangular colon vowel length symbol.