The official romanization system for

Taiwanese Hokkien Taiwanese Hokkien () (; Tâi-lô: ''Tâi-uân-uē''), also known as Taigi/Taigu (; Pe̍h-ōe-jī/ Tâi-lô: ''Tâi-gí / Tâi-gú''), Taiwanese, Taiwanese Minnan, Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively by about ...

in Taiwan is locally referred to as Tâi-uân Lô-má-jī Phing-im Hong-àn () or Taiwan Minnanyu Luomazi Pinyin Fang'an (), often shortened to Tâi-lô. It is derived from

Pe̍h-ōe-jī (; ; ), also sometimes known as the Church Romanization, is an orthography used to write variants of Southern Min Chinese, particularly Taiwanese Hokkien, Taiwanese and Amoy dialect, Amoy Hokkien. Developed by Western missionary, missionaries ...

and since 2006 has been one of the phonetic notation systems officially promoted by

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia, at the junction of the East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocean, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the northwest, Japan to the nort ...

Ministry of Education An education ministry is a national or subnational government agency politically responsible for education. Various other names are commonly used to identify such agencies, such as Ministry of Education, Department of Education, and Ministry of Pub ...

. The system is used in the MoE's ''

Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan The ''Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan'' () is a dictionary of Taiwanese Hokkien (including Written Hokkien) commissioned by the Ministry of Education of Taiwan. The dictionary uses the Taiwanese Romanization System (based on pe̍h-� ...

''. It is nearly identical to

, apart from: using ''ts tsh'' instead of ''ch chh'', using ''u'' instead of ''o'' in vowel combinations such as ''oa'' and ''oe'', using ''i'' instead of ''e'' in ''eng'' and ''ek'', using ''oo'' instead of ''o͘'', and using ''nn'' instead of ''ⁿ''.

Alphabet

The Taiwanese Romanization System uses 16 basic

Latin letter The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Ital ...

s (A, B, E, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, S, T, U), 7 digraphs (Kh, Ng, nn, Oo, Ph, Th, Ts) and a trigraph (Tsh). In addition, it uses 6

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 to represent tones. * "nn" is only used after a

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...

to express

nasalization In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internation ...

, so it only appears capitalized in all-caps texts. * Palatalization occurs when "j, s, ts, tsh" are followed by "i", so "ji, si, tsi, tshi" are sometimes governed as trigraphs and

tetragraph A tetragraph (from the el, τετρα-, ''tetra-'', "four" and γράφω, ''gráphō'', "write") is a sequence of four letters used to represent a single sound (phoneme), or a combination of sounds, that do not necessarily correspond to the indi ...

s. * Of the 10 unused basic Latin letters, "R" is sometimes used to express

dialectal The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a ...

vowels (somewhat similar to

erhua Erhua ( ); also called erization or rhotacization of syllable finals) is a phonological process that adds r-coloring or the "er" (注音：, common words: 、、) sound (transcribed in IPA as ) to syllables in spoken Mandarin Chinese. Erhuayin () i ...

), while the others (C, D, F, Q, V, W, X, Y, Z) are only used in

loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because t ...

Sample texts

;Tâi-lô :Pe̍h-uē-jī (PUJ) sī tsı̍t khuán iōng Latin (Lô-má) phìng-im hē-thóng lâi siá Tâi-uân ê gí-giân ê su-bīn bûn-jī. In-uī tong-tshoo sī thuân-kàu-sū ín--jı̍p-lâi ê, sóo-í ia̍h-ū-lâng kā PUJ kiò-tsò Kàu-huē Lô-má-jī, hı̍k-tsiá sī kán-tshing Kàu-lô. Put-jî-kò hiān-tāi ê sú-iōng-tsiá bē-tsió m̄-sī kàu-tôo, kàu-tôo mā tsin tsē bē-hiáu PUJ. ;Pe̍h-ōe-jī :Pe̍h-ōe-jī (POJ) sī chı̍t khoán iōng Latin (Lô-má) phèng-im hē-thóng lâi siá Tâi-ôan ê gí-giân ê su-bīn bûn-jī. In-ūi tong-chho͘ sī thôan-kàu-sū ín--jı̍p-lâi ê, só͘-í ia̍h-ū-lâng kā POJ kiò-chò Kàu-hōe Lô-má-jī, he̍k-chiá sī kán-chheng Kàu-lô. Put-jî-kò hiān-tāi ê sú-iōng-chiá bē-chió m̄-sī kàu-tô͘, kàu-tô͘ mā chin chē bē-hiáu POJ. ;Hàn-jī :白話字（POJ）是一款用拉丁（羅馬）拼音系統來寫臺灣的語言的書面文字。因為當初是傳教士引入來的，所以也有人共POJ叫做教會羅馬字，或者是簡稱教羅。不而過現代的使用者袂少毋是教徒，教徒嘛真濟袂曉POJ。 ;IPA :

Values

Consonants

Vowels & Rhymes

* ''o'' pronounced ə.html" ;"title="Mid_central_vowel.html" ;"title="nowiki/>Mid central vowel">ə">Mid_central_vowel.html" ;"title="nowiki/>Mid central vowel">əㄜ in general dialect in Kaohsiung and Tainan, [o] ㄛ in Taipei. * ''-nn'' forms the nasal vowels * There is also syllabic consonant, syllabic ''m'' and ''ng''. * ''ing'' pronounced [ɪəŋ], ''ik'' pronounced [ɪək̚].

Tones

A hyphen links elements of a compound word. A double hyphen indicates that the following syllable has a neutral tone and therefore that the preceding syllable does not undergo tone sandhi.

Computing

Unicode codepoints

The following are tone characters and their respective Unicode codepoints used in Tâi-lô. The tones used by Tâi-lô should use Combining Diacritical Marks instead of

Spacing Modifier Letters Spacing Modifier Letters is a Unicode block containing characters for the IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound ...

used by bopomofo. As Tâi-lô is not encoded in

Big5 Big-5 or Big5 is a Chinese character encoding method used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau for traditional Chinese characters. The People's Republic of China (PRC), which uses simplified Chinese characters, uses the GB 18030 character set inst ...

, the prevalent encoding used in Traditional Chinese, some Taiwanese Romanization System letters are not directly encoded in Unicode, instead should be typed using combining diacritical marks officially. Characters not directly encoded in Unicode requires premade glyphs in fonts in order for applications to correctly display the characters.

Font support

Fonts that currently support POJ includes: * Charis SIL * DejaVu *

Doulos SIL Doulos SIL (Ancient Greek for "slave") is a serif typeface developed by SIL International, very similar to Times or Times New Roman. Unlike Times New Roman, Doulos only has a single face, Regular. The goal of its design according to the SIL In ...

* Linux Libertine *

Taigi Unicode Taigi Unicode is a TrueType font specifically designed to include the character combinations necessary to display Pe̍h-ōe-jī, a romanization for Taiwanese Hokkien Taiwanese Hokkien () (; Tâi-lô: ''Tâi-uân-uē''), also known as Taigi/T ...

Source Sans Pro Source Sans Pro is a sans serif typeface created by Paul D. Hunt, released by Adobe in 2012. It is the first open-source font family from Adobe, distributed under the SIL Open Font License. The typeface is inspired by the forms of the Americ ...

I.Ming
(8.00 onwards) fro
Ichiten Font Project
* Fonts made by justfont foundry * Fonts modified and release in GitHub repositor
POJFonts
: POJ Phiaute, Gochi Hand POJ, Nunito POJ, POJ Vibes, and POJ Garamond. * Fonts modified and released by But Ko based on

Source Han Sans Source Han Sans is a sans-serif gothic typeface family created by Adobe and Google. It is also released by Google under the Noto fonts project as Noto Sans CJK. The family includes seven weights, and supports Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chin ...

GenyogGensekiGensen
; based on

Source Han Serif Source Han Serif (also known as Noto Serif CJK) is a serif Song/Ming typeface created by Adobe and Google. Design Latin-script letters and numerals are from the Source Serif Pro font. Changzhou SinoType Co., Ltd., Iwata Corporation and Sandol ...

GenyoGenwanGenryu

Notes

Words in native languages

References

External links

臺灣閩南語羅馬拼音及其發音學習網
{{in lang, zh, Taiwanese Romanization System (Tai-lo) learning site by the

Romanization of Hokkien Southern Min