English 繁體中文 简体中文 Default
 

Background

It has been a long time that there do not have a popular and simple Cantonese romanization scheme (transcript system) to denote Cantonese pronunciations. In the past, there were some Cantonese romanization schemes that were comparatively popular, such as Yale University style, Sidney Lau style, Wong Shek Ling style, etc. However, as there were a lot of schemes and each scheme was not widely adopted, that made the Cantonese romanizations not consistent and not popular.

Because of this, the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong set up the "粵語拼音方案工作組" (Cantonese Romanization Scheme Work Group) in 1992. The aim of the work group was to standardize a simple, easy-to-learn and easy-to-use Cantonese romanization scheme, so that to improve the situation of the inconsistency in Cantonese romanizations. The Linguistic Society of Hong Kong published its Cantonese romanization scheme in 1993. The official name of the scheme is "香港語言學學會粵語拼音方案" (Cantonese Romanization Scheme, Linguistic Society of Hong Kong), or simply called "粵拼" (Jyutping).

The characters used in the scheme are basic Latin and number, therefore can be input using an ordinary computer keyboard. Thus, the scheme can be widely adopted in different areas.