Romanisation
In antiquity, Romanization or Latinization was also the imposition of Roman culture and language.
A Romanization or Latinization is a system for representing a word or language with the Latin alphabet, where the original word or language used a writing system other than the Roman alphabet. Three methods may be used to carry out Romanization: transliteration, transcription and phonemic conversion. Each Romanization has its own set of rules for pronunciation of the Romanized words.
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.)
Chinese language
Some languages have more than one system of Romanization; Mandarin, for example, has several, including Wade-Giles, Yale, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, MPS II, Postal System Pinyin, Tongyong Pinyin, and Hanyu pinyin; and Cantonese has Jyutping, penkyamp, Gwohngdongwaa pengyam, Sidney Lau, Barnett-Chao, Meyer-Wempe, EFEO, 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 students whose mother tongue is not Mandarin. China has literally hundreds of distinct dialects, though there is one common written language.
