Yale romanization of Cantonese

The Yale romanization of Cantonese was developed by Yale scholar Gerard P. Kok for his and Parker Po-fei Huang's textbook Speak Cantonese initially circulated in looseleaf form in 1952^[1] but later published in 1958.^[2] Unlike the Yale romanization of Mandarin, it is still widely used in books and dictionaries, especially for foreign learners of Cantonese. It shares some similarities with Hanyu Pinyin in that unvoiced, unaspirated consonants are represented by letters traditionally used in English and most other European languages to represent voiced sounds. For example, [p] is represented as b in Yale, whereas its aspirated counterpart, [pʰ] is represented as p.^[3] Students attending The Chinese University of Hong Kong's New-Asia Yale-in-China Chinese Language Center are taught using Yale romanization.^[4]

Some enthusiasts employ Yale romanisation to explore writing Cantonese as an alphabetic language.^{[citation needed]}

• Only the finals m and ng can be used as standalone nasal syllables.

Modern Cantonese has up to seven phonemic tones. Cantonese Yale represents these tones using a combination of diacritics and the letter h.^[5][6] Traditional Chinese linguistics treats the tones in syllables ending with a stop consonant as separate "entering tones". Cantonese Yale follows modern linguistic conventions in treating these the same as the high-flat, mid-flat and low-flat tones, respectively.

Sample transcription of one of the 300 Tang Poems by Meng Haoran:

Note concerning the jì in the last line of the poem that it is pronounced as high flat here because immediately followed by a tone that begins high and yet that this Romanization's conventions mark it nonetheless as high falling, and the user then needs to remember this rule of tone-sandhi. (Interested readers can confirm this convention by looking at for instance the dictionary by Kwan Choi Wah among the works in the list at bottom below.)

• Cantonese phonology
• Jyutping
• Guangdong Romanization
• ILE romanization of Cantonese
• Sidney Lau romanisation
• S. L. Wong (phonetic symbols)
• Barnett–Chao Romanisation
• Yale romanization of Mandarin
• Yale romanization of Korean

• Kwan, Choi Wah 關彩華 (2000). English-Cantonese Dictionary - 英粤字典: Cantonese in Yale Romanization (2nd ed.). Chinese University Press. ISBN 962-201-970-6.
• Matthews, Stephen & Yip, Virginia (1994). Cantonese. A Comprehensive Grammar. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-08945-X.
• Ng Lam, Sim-yuk & Chik, Hon-man (2000). Chinese-English Dictionary 漢英小字典: Cantonese in Yale Romanization, Mandarin in Pinyin. Chinese University Press. ISBN 962-201-922-6.

• Comparison chart of Romanization for Cantonese with Yale, S. Lau, Guangdong, Toho and LSHK (uses Shift JIS encoding)
• MDBG free online Chinese-English dictionary (supports Cantonese Yale romanization)