Guangdong Romanization refers to the four romanization schemes published by the

Guangdong ) means "wide" or "vast", and has been associated with the region since the creation of Guang Prefecture in AD 226. The name "''Guang''" ultimately came from Guangxin ( zh, labels=no, first=t, t= , s=广信), an outpost established in Han dynasty ...

Provincial Education Department in 1960 for transliterating

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 ...

, Teochew, Hakka and Hainanese. The schemes utilized similar elements with some differences in order to adapt to their respective spoken varieties. In certain respects, Guangdong romanization resembles

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

in its distinction of the alveolar initials ''z'', ''c'', ''s'' from the

alveolo-palatal In phonetics, alveolo-palatal (alveolopalatal, ''alveo-palatal'' or ''alveopalatal'') consonants, sometimes synonymous with pre-palatal consonants, are intermediate in articulation between the coronal and dorsal consonants, or which have simu ...

initials ''j'', ''q'', ''x'' and in its use of ''b'', ''d'', ''g'' to represent the unaspirated

stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lip ...

s . In addition, it makes use of the medial ''u'' before the rime rather than representing it as ''w'' in the initial when it follows ''g'' or ''k''. Guangdong romanization makes use of

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 ''diacrit ...

s to represent certain vowels. This includes the use of the

circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from "bent around"a translation of ...

acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...

and diaeresis in the letters ''ê'', ''é'' and ''ü'', respectively. In addition, it uses ''-b'', ''-d'', ''-g'' to represent the coda consonants rather than ''-p'', ''-t'', ''-k'' like other romanization schemes in order to be consistent with their use as unaspirated plosives in the initial. Tones are marked by

superscript A subscript or superscript is a character (such as a number or letter) that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, wh ...

numbers rather than by diacritics.

Cantonese

The scheme for

is outlined in "The Cantonese Transliteration Scheme" (). It is referred to as the Canton Romanization on the LSHK character database. The system is not used in Hong Kong where romanization schemes such as

Hong Kong Government The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (commonly known as the Hong Kong Government or HKSAR Government) is the Executive (government), executive authorities of Hong Kong. It was established on 1 July 1997, following the ...

, Yale, ILE and

Jyutping The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme, also known as Jyutping, is a romanisation system for Cantonese developed in 1993 by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (LSHK). The name ''Jyutping'' (itself the Jyutping ro ...

are popular, though it can be seen in works released in the

People's Republic of China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

regarding Cantonese.

Teochew

The scheme for the Teochew dialect of Min Nan is outlined in "The Teochew Transliteration Scheme" (). This scheme (and another similar scheme which is based upon this scheme) is often referred to as Peng'im, which is the Teochew pronunciation of ''pinyin''. This scheme is the romanization scheme currently described in the Teochew dialect article.

Hakka

The scheme for Hakka is outlined in "The Hakka Transliteration Scheme" (). The scheme describes the Meixian dialect, which is generally regarded as the de facto standard dialect of Hakka in mainland China.

Hainanese

The scheme for Hainanese is outlined in the "Hainanese Transliteration Scheme" (). The scheme describes the Wenchang dialect, which is generally regarded as the prestige dialect of Hainanese in mainland China, used in provincial broadcasting.

External links

Cukda Cantonese IME

* ttps://web.archive.org/web/20100111000957/http://www.sungwh.freeserve.co.uk/chinese/chaozhou.htm 潮州話拼音方案 - ChaoZhou Dialect Romanization Scheme
梅縣話拼音方案 - Meixian Dialect ( 客家 / Kejia / Hakka ) Romanization Scheme

References

* {{cite book , author=Yang, Mingxin (杨明新) , title=A Concise Cantonese-English Dictionary (简明粤英词典) , publisher=Guangdong Higher Education Publishing House (广东高等教育出版社) , year=1999 , isbn=7-5361-2350-7 Cantonese romanisation Hakka Chinese Southern Min Chaoshan Hainan Min