The Yale romanization of Cantonese was developed by

Yale Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and one of the nine colonial colleges ch ...

scholar Gerard P. Kok for his and Parker Po-fei Huang's textbook ''Speak Cantonese'' initially circulated in looseleaf form in 1952 but later published in 1958. Unlike the

Yale romanization of Mandarin The Yale romanization of Mandarin is a system for transcribing the sounds of Standard Chinese, based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. It was devised in 1943 by the Yale sinologist George Kennedy for a course teaching Chinese to American soldi ...

, it is still widely used in books and dictionaries, especially for foreign learners of

Cantonese Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...

. It shares some similarities with

Hanyu Pinyin Hanyu Pinyin, or simply pinyin, officially the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. ''Hanyu'' () literally means ' Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—while ''pinyin'' literally ...

in that unvoiced, unaspirated

consonants In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

are represented by letters traditionally used in English and most other European languages to represent voiced sounds. For example, is represented as ''b'' in Yale, whereas its aspirated counterpart, is represented as ''p''. Students attending the

Chinese University of Hong Kong The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) is a public university, public research university in Sha Tin, New Territories, Hong Kong. Established in 1963 as a federation of three university college, collegesChung Chi College, New Asia Coll ...

's New-Asia Yale-in-China Chinese Language Center are taught using Yale romanization. Some enthusiasts employ Yale romanisation to explore .

Initials

Finals

* Only the finals ''m'' and ''ng'' can be used as standalone nasal syllables.

Tones

Modern Cantonese has up to seven phonemic tones. Cantonese Yale represents these tones using a combination of diacritics and the letter ''h''.Gwaan 2000: 7. "Basically, there are seven tones which, in the Yale system, are represented by the use of diacritics and by the insertion of h for the three low tones. The following chart will illustrate the seven tones: 3 Mid Level, 1 High Level, 5 Low Falling, 6 Low Level..." Traditional Chinese linguistics treats the tones in syllables ending with a stop consonant as separate "

entering tone A checked tone, commonly known by the Chinese calque entering tone, is one of the four syllable types in the phonology of Middle Chinese. Although usually translated as "tone", a checked tone is not a tone in the western phonetic sense but rather ...

s". Cantonese Yale follows modern linguistic conventions in treating these the same as the high-flat, mid-flat and low-flat tones, respectively.

Examples

Sample transcription of one of the ''300 Tang Poems'' by

Meng Haoran Meng Haoran (; 689/691–740) was a Chinese poet and a major literary figure of the Tang dynasty. He was somewhat an older contemporary of Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu. Despite his brief pursuit of an official career, Meng Haoran spent most of hi ...

: Note concerning the jì in the last line of the poem that it is pronounced as high flat here because immediately followed by a tone that begins high and yet that this Romanization's conventions mark it nonetheless as high falling, and the user then needs to remember this rule of tone-sandhi. (Interested readers can confirm this convention by looking at for instance the dictionary by Kwan Choi Wah among the works in the list at bottom below.)

References

External links

Comparison chart of Romanization for Cantonese with Yale, S. Lau, Guangdong, Toho and LSHK (uses Shift JIS encoding)

MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary (supports Cantonese Yale romanization)
{{Portal bar, China, Hong Kong, Language Cantonese romanisation Writing systems introduced in 1970 Languages of Hong Kong