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BGN/PCGN romanization
 
 
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BGN/PCGN romanization refers to the systems for romanization
Romanization

In linguistics, romanization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Latin alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system ....
 (transliteration
Transliteration

Transliteration is the practice of transcribing a word or text written in one writing system into another writing system or system of rules for such practice....
 into the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
) and Roman-script spelling conventions adopted by the United States Board on Geographic Names
United States Board on Geographic Names

The United States Board on Geographic Names is a United States Federal government of the United States body whose purpose is to establish and maintain uniform usage of geography names throughout the government of the United States....
 (BGN) and the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use (PCGN).

Details of these systems are outlined in the U.S. BGN 1994 publication Romanization Systems and Roman-Script Spelling Conventions, which supersedes the older Romanization Guide (1972).






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BGN/PCGN romanization refers to the systems for romanization
Romanization

In linguistics, romanization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Latin alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system ....
 (transliteration
Transliteration

Transliteration is the practice of transcribing a word or text written in one writing system into another writing system or system of rules for such practice....
 into the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
) and Roman-script spelling conventions adopted by the United States Board on Geographic Names
United States Board on Geographic Names

The United States Board on Geographic Names is a United States Federal government of the United States body whose purpose is to establish and maintain uniform usage of geography names throughout the government of the United States....
 (BGN) and the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names for British Official Use (PCGN).

Details of these systems are outlined in the U.S. BGN 1994 publication Romanization Systems and Roman-Script Spelling Conventions, which supersedes the older Romanization Guide (1972). Romanization systems and spelling conventions for different languages were gradually introduced over the course of several years. As of today, BGN/PCGN systems and agreements cover the following twenty-nine languages (the date of adoption is given in the parentheses):

  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Amharic
    Amharic language

    Amharic is a Semitic languages spoken in North Central Ethiopia by the Amhara people. It is the second most spoken Semitic language in the world, after Arabic language, and the official working language of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia....
     (1967 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Arabic
    Arabic language

    Arabic is a Central Semitic language, thus related to and classified alongside other Semitic languages languages such as Hebrew language and Aramaic language....
     (1956 system; BGN 1946, PCGN 1956)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Armenian
    Armenian language

    The 'Armenian language' is an Indo-European language spoken by the Armenians. It is the official language of the Armenia as well as in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh....
     (1981 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Azerbaijani
    Azerbaijani language

    Azerbaijani is a language belonging to the Turkic languages language family, spoken in southwestern Asia, primarily in Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran....
     Cyrillic script (1993 agreement)—note that the Government of Azerbaijan abandoned the Cyrillic script in 1991 and adopted the Roman alphabet to replace it
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Bulgarian
    Bulgarian language

    Bulgarian is an Indo-European languages, a member of the Slavic languages linguistic group.Bulgarian demonstrates several linguistic innovations that set it apart from all other Slavic languages except Macedonian language, such as the elimination of grammatical case, the development of a suffixed definite article , the lack of a verb infin...
     (1952 system; BGN 1949, PCGN 1952)—see Romanization of Bulgarian
    Romanization of Bulgarian

    Romanization of Bulgarian is the transliteration of text in the Bulgarian language from the Cyrillic alphabet into the Latin alphabet. This table lists several transliteration schemes:...
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Burmese
    Burmese language

    The Burmese language is the official language of Burma. Although the government officially recognizes the language as Myanmar in English, most continue to refer to the language as Burmese....
     (1970 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization
    BGN/PCGN romanization of Belarusian

    The BGN/PCGN romanization system for Belarusian is a method for romanization of Cyrillic Belarusian language texts, that is, their transliteration into the Latin alphabet....
     of Belarusian
    Belarusian language

    The Belarusian language, or Belorussian is the language of the Belarusians and is spoken in Belarus and abroad, chiefly in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland....
     (1979 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Chinese
    Chinese language

    Chinese or the Sinitic language is a language family consisting of language mutually unintelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the two branches of Sino-Tibetan languages of languages....
     (1979 agreement)—Chinese characters are romanized by BGN/PCGN by means of the Pinyin
    Pinyin

    Pinyin, more formally Hanyu pinyin, is the most commonly used Romanization system for Standard Mandarin. Hanyu is the Chinese Language, and pinyin means "phonetics", or more literally, "spelling sound" or "spelled sound"....
     system
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Dhivehi
    Dhivehi language

    Dhivehi, Divehi or Mahl is an Indo-Aryan languages spoken by about 350,000 people in the Republic of Maldives and also in the island of Minicoy Island in neighbouring India, where it is known by another name, the Mahal language or Mahal language ....
     (1988 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Georgian
    Georgian language

    Georgian is the official language of Georgia , a country in the Caucasus .Georgian is the primary language of about 3.9 million people in Georgia itself, and of another 500,000 abroad ....
     (1981 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Greek
    Greek language

    Greek is an Indo-European languages native to the southern Balkan peninsula, the language of the Greek people. It forms an independent branch within Indo-European....
     (1962 system; PCGN 1941, later adopted by BGN, jointly revised in 1962)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Hebrew
    Hebrew language

    Hebrew is a Semitic languages of the Afro-Asiatic languages. Modern Hebrew is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel and Classical Hebrew is used for prayer or study in Jews communities around the world....
     (1962 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Japanese
    Japanese language

    IPA: [n?iho?go] is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is related to the Ryukyuan languages....
     kana
    Kana

    Kana are the Syllabary Japanese language scripts, as opposed to the Logogram Chinese characters known in Japan as kanji and the Roman alphabet known as romaji....
    —Japanese is romanized by BGN/PCGN by means of the modified Hepburn system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Kazakh
    Kazakh language

    Kazakh is a Turkic languages language closely related to Nogai language and Karakalpak language.Kazakh is an agglutinative language, and it employs vowel harmony....
     (1979 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Khmer
    Khmer language

    Khmer , or Cambodian, is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. It is the second most widely spoken Austro-Asiatic languages, with speakers in the tens of millions....
     (1972 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Kyrgyz
    Kyrgyz language

    Kyrgyz or Kirghiz is a Turkic languages and, together with Russian language, an official language of Kyrgyzstan. It is most closely related to Altay language and more distantly so to Kazakh language....
     (1979 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Korean
    Korean language

    Korean is the official language of North Korea and South Korea. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China....
     (BGN 1943, with PCGN soon to follow)—Korean is romanized by BGN/PCGN by means of the McCune-Reischauer system
    McCune-Reischauer

    McCune-Reischauer romanization is one of the two most widely used Korean language romanization systems, along with the Revised Romanization of Korean, which replaced McCune-Reischauer as the official romanization system in South Korea in 2000....
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Lao
    Lao language

    Lao or Laotian is a tonal language of the Kradai language family. It is the official language of Laos, and also spoken in the northeast of Thailand, where it is usually referred to as the Isan language....
     (1966 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Macedonian
    Macedonian language

    Macedonian is the official language of the Republic of Macedonia and is a part of the Eastern group of South Slavic languages. Macedonian is closely related to and shares a high degree of mutual intelligibility with the Bulgarian language, Serbian language, Bosnian language, and Croatian language languages....
     (1981 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Mongolian
    Mongolian language

    The Mongolian language is the best-known member of the Mongolic languages. It is the language of most residents of Mongolia and of many of the Mongolian residents of Inner Mongolia, totalling about 5.7 million speakers....
     (1964 system; PCGN 1957, BGN 1964)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Nepali
    Nepali language

    Nepali is a language in the Indo-Aryan languages of the Indo-European languages.It is the lingua-franca of Nepal and is also spoken in Bhutan, parts of India and parts of Myanmar ....
     (1964 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Pashto
    Pashto language

    Pashto , also known as Afghani, is an Indo-European language spoken primarily in Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan. Pashto belongs to the East Iranian languages branch of the Indo-Iranian languages language family....
     (1968 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Persian
    Persian language

    name=Persian|nativename=|pronunciation=[f??r'si]|image=|caption=Farsi in Perso-Arabic script |states= Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Bahrain....
     (1958 system; BGN 1946, PCGN 1958)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization
    BGN/PCGN romanization of Russian

    BGN/PCGN romanization system for Russian is a method for romanization of Cyrillic Russian language texts, that is, their transliteration into the Latin alphabet as used in the English language....
     of Russian
    Russian language

    Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
     (1947 system; BGN 1944, PCGN 1947)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Serbian
    Serbian language

    name=Serbian|nativename=|pronunciation=['sr?pski?]|familycolor=Indo-European|map=|states=See below under "Official status", besides that in Croatia and as an immigrant's language spread over Central Europe and Western Europe, as well as Northern America...
     (Cyrillic script) — Serbian is not romanized by BGN/PCGN; instead, the Roman script that corresponds to the Cyrillic script is used
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Thai
    Thai language

    Thai , is the national language and official language language of Thailand and the mother tongue of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group....
     (1970 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Turkmen
    Turkmen language

    Turkmen is the name of the national language of Turkmenistan. It is spoken by approximately 3,430,000 people in Turkmenistan, and by an additional approximately 6,000,000 people in other countries, including Iran , Iraq , Syria , Afghanistan , and Turkey ....
     (1979 system)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Ukrainian
    Ukrainian language

    Ukrainian is a language of the East Slavic languages of the Slavic languages. It is the official language of Ukraine. In some areas of Russia there are dialects, Balachka or Surzhyk, which are the Ukrainianized versions of the Russian language....
     (1965 system)—see Romanization of Ukrainian
    Romanization of Ukrainian

    The romanization or Latinization of Ukrainian is the representation of the Ukrainian language using Latin alphabet. Ukrainian is natively written in its own Ukrainian alphabet, a variation of Cyrillic alphabet....
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Uzbek
    Uzbek language

    Uzbek is a Turkic languages and the official language of Uzbekistan. It has about 23.5 million native speakers, and it is spoken by the Uzbeks in Uzbekistan and elsewhere in Central Asia....
     (1979 system)


In addition to the systems above, BGN/PCGN adopted Roman Script Spelling Conventions for languages that use the Roman alphabet but use letters not present in the English alphabet. These conventions exist for the following four languages:
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Faroese
    Faroese language

    Faroese , often also spelled Faeroese , is a West Nordic or West Scandinavian language spoken by 48,000 people in the Faroe Islands and about 12,000 Faroese people in Denmark....
     (1968 agreement)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of German
    German language

    German is a West Germanic languages, thus related to and classified alongside English language and Dutch language. It is one of the world's world language and the most widely spoken mother tongue in the European Union....
     (1986 agreement)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Icelandic
    Icelandic language

    Icelandic is a North Germanic languages, the language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese language and Norwegian dialects such as Telemark dialect and Sognam?l....
     (1968 agreement)
  • BGN/PCGN romanization of Northern Sami
    Northern Sami

    Northern or North Sami is the most widely spoken of all Sami languages. The speaking area of Northern Sami covers the northern parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland as well as northwestern parts of Russia....
     (1984 agreement)


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