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To romanize is to transcribe or transliterate a language into the Roman alphabet. This process is most commonly associated with the Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages (CJK).
(The similar process of representing a language using the Cyrillic alphabet may be named Cyrillization.)
Many critics consider Romanization to be a form of racism and/or ethnocentrism because it seems to imply that the Roman alphabet is superior to the native writing systems of other languages.
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Some languages have more than one system of Romanization; Mandarin, for example, has several, including Wade-Giles, Yale, Postal Pinyin, Tongyong Pinyin, and Hanyu pinyin; and Cantonese has Jyutping, penkyamp, Gwohngdongwaa pengyam, Sidney Lau, Barnett-Chao, Meyer-Wempe, and Yale.
In Mainland China, Hanyu Pinyin has been used officially for decades, primarily as a linguistic tool for teaching the official Mandarin variant of Chinese to student whose mother tongue is not Mandarin. The Roman alphabet is used to commonalise the pronunciation of Mandarin words, since Chinese characters describe only things and concepts, and provide no pronunciation information. China has literally hundreds of distinct dialects, though there is one common written language.
Romanization in Japanese is called "Romaji". Common systems include Hepburn and Kunrei-shiki systems. ISO 3602 is a system approved by ISO.
Romanization in the Korean language is called "Romaja". The most common system that was used in South Korea was the McCune-Reischauer system. North Korea continues its usage. Today, South Korea uses the revised version of Romanization that was approved by their government in the year of 2000. Road signs and textbooks are required to follow these rules as soon as possible. Personal names are still left to personal preference, but the government encourages using the new system. A third system--the Yale romanization system--is used mainly in academic literature. During the period of Russian interest in Korea at the beginning of the 20th century, attempts were also made at representing Korean in Cyrillic.
Chinese language
External links
Japanese language
Korean language
''Main article: Romanization of Korean