Romanisatie

Romanisatie, or romanization, is the process of transcribing a language written in a non-Latin script into the Latin alphabet. It aims to make words readable, pronounceable, searchable, and usable in international contexts. Although the terms romanisatie and transliteration are sometimes used interchangeably, romanization often emphasizes readability and phonetic rendering, while transliteration concentrates on a letter-for-letter mapping from the source script.

Romanization systems vary in goals and methods. Some prioritize phonetic accuracy (how a word sounds), others preserve the source-script identity (letter shapes). Standards are formalized by international and national bodies; examples include Hanyu Pinyin for Mandarin; Hepburn and Kunrei-shiki for Japanese; Revised Romanization of Korean; ISO 9 for Cyrillic scripts; ISO 843 for Greek; ALA-LC and DIN standards for Arabic and Hebrew. Many languages have multiple competing schemes or historical variants.

Common use cases include dictionaries, bibliographic indexing, passports and official documents, cartography, and digital data processing. In computing, romanization enables search and input in Latin-only environments, while Unicode supports native scripts for display. Some languages with tone or diacritics may use diacritics in romanization to reflect pronunciation, while others use digraphs or numbers to indicate tones.

Challenges include representing tones and vowels unambiguously, handling proper nouns across languages, cultural and political sensitivities in naming, and keeping standards up to date with changes in language policy and technology. With the growth of global communication, consistent romanization remains essential for multilingual information management.