Romanisation

Romanisation, or romanization, is the practice of rendering text written in a non-Latin writing system into the Latin alphabet. It serves to represent either the original script transliteratively (mapping characters to Latin equivalents) or the pronunciation phonetically (transcription). Some systems aim to be reversible, preserving enough information to reconstruct the source script, while others prioritize readability, indexing, or ease of use in digital and international contexts.

There are many language-specific romanisation schemes. For Chinese, the most widely used is Pinyin, with historical alternatives such as Wade-Giles. Japanese romanisation includes Hepburn and Kunrei-shiki. Korean has the Revised Romanization of Korean and McCune-Reischauer. Arabic has standards such as ISO 233 and the ALA-LC romanisations. Cyrillic alphabets are covered by standards like ISO 9 for transliteration, and Greek by ISO 843. In academic circles, transliteration and transcription schemes are chosen to suit dictionaries, linguistic analysis, or archiving needs; for Hindi and related languages, schemes include IAST and ITRANS. Each scheme differs in how it treats letters, diacritics, tone, and punctuation, affecting fidelity to the source and reversibility.

Romanisation is used widely in library cataloging, cartography, passports and other official documents, linguistics research, and digital information retrieval. It facilitates international communication and searchability but can introduce ambiguities and inconsistencies when multiple schemes exist for the same language, or when diacritics are omitted. Debates continue over which standards should be adopted in education, publishing, and technology to balance accuracy, usability, and interoperability.