The official romanization system for

Taiwanese Hokkien Taiwanese Hokkien ( , ), or simply Taiwanese, also known as Taigi ( zh, c=臺語, tl=Tâi-gí), Taiwanese Southern Min ( zh, c=臺灣閩南語, tl=Tâi-uân Bân-lâm-gí), Hoklo and Holo, is a variety of the Hokkien language spoken natively ...

(usually called "Taiwanese") in

Taiwan Taiwan, officially the Republic of China (ROC), is a country in East Asia. The main geography of Taiwan, island of Taiwan, also known as ''Formosa'', lies between the East China Sea, East and South China Seas in the northwestern Pacific Ocea ...

is known as Tâi-uân Tâi-gí Lô-má-jī Phing-im Hong-àn, often shortened to Tâi-lô. It is derived from ''

Pe̍h-ōe-jī ( ; , , ; POJ), also known as Church Romanization, is an orthography used to write variants of Hokkien Southern Min, particularly Taiwanese Hokkien, Taiwanese and Amoy dialect, Amoy Hokkien, and it is widely employed as one of the writing syst ...

'' and since 2006 has been one of the phonetic notation systems officially promoted by Taiwan's Ministry of Education. The system is used in the MoE's '' Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan''. It is nearly identical to

, apart from: using ''ts tsh'' instead of ''ch chh'', using ''u'' instead of ''o'' in vowel combinations such as ''oa'' and ''oe'', using ''i'' instead of ''e'' in ''eng'' and ''ek'', using ''oo'' instead of ''o͘'', and using ''nn'' instead of ''ⁿ''.

Alphabet

The Taiwanese Romanization System uses 16 basic

Latin letter The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

s (A, B, E, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, S, T, U), 7 digraphs (Kh, Ng, nn, Oo, Ph, Th, Ts) and a trigraph (Tsh). In addition, it uses 6

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

s to represent tones. * ''nn'' is only used after a

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

to express

nasalization In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation in British English) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . ...

, so it only appears capitalized in all-caps texts. * Palatalization occurs when ''j'', ''s'', ''ts'', ''tsh'' are followed by ''i'', so ''ji'', ''si'', ''tsi'', ''tshi'' are sometimes considered multigraphs. * Of the 10 unused basic Latin letters, R is sometimes used to express dialectal vowels (''ir'' and ''er''), while the others (C, D, F, Q, V, W, X, Y, Z) are only used in

loanword A loanword (also a loan word, loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term t ...

Sample texts

; Tâi-lô : ; Pe̍h-ōe-jī : ; Hàn-jī : ; IPA :

Values

Consonants

Vowels & rhymes

* ''o'' pronounced ə">Mid_central_vowel.html" ;"title="nowiki/>Mid central vowel">əㄜ in general dialect in Kaohsiung and Tainan, [o] ㄛ in Taipei. * ''-nn'' forms the nasal vowels * There is also syllabic consonant, syllabic ''m'' and ''ng''. * ''ing'' pronounced [ɪəŋ], ''ik'' pronounced [ɪək̚].

Tones

A hyphen links elements of a compound word. A double hyphen indicates that the following syllable has a neutral tone and therefore that the preceding syllable does not undergo tone sandhi.

Computing

The

IETF language tag An IETF BCP 47 language tag is a standardized code that is used to identify human languages on the Internet. The tag structure has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in ''Best Current Practice (BCP) 47''; the subtags ...

s register for Tâi-lô text.

Unicode codepoints

The following are tone characters and their respective Unicode codepoints used in Tâi-lô. The tones used by Tâi-lô should use

Combining Diacritical Marks Combining Diacritical Marks is a Unicode block containing the most common combining characters. It also contains the character " Combining Grapheme Joiner", which prevents canonical reordering of combining characters, and despite the name, actua ...

instead of

Spacing Modifier Letters Spacing Modifier Letters is a Unicode block containing characters for the IPA, UPA, and other phonetic transcriptions. Included are the IPA tone marks, and modifiers for aspiration and palatalization. The word ''spacing'' indicates that these ...

used by

bopomofo Bopomofo, also called Zhuyin Fuhao ( ; ), or simply Zhuyin, is a Chinese transliteration, transliteration system for Standard Chinese and other Sinitic languages. It is the principal method of teaching Chinese Mandarin pronunciation in Taiwa ...

. As Tâi-lô is not encoded in

Big5 Big-5 or Big5 ( zh, t=大五碼) is a Chinese character encoding method used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau for traditional Chinese characters. The People's Republic of China (PRC), which uses simplified Chinese characters, uses the GB 18030 ...

, the prevalent encoding used in Traditional Chinese, some Taiwanese Romanization System letters are not directly encoded in Unicode, instead should be typed using combining diacritical marks officially. Characters not directly encoded in Unicode requires premade glyphs in fonts in order for applications to correctly display the characters.

Font support

Fonts that currently support POJ includes: *

Charis SIL Charis SIL or Charis () is a slab serif typeface developed by SIL International based on Bitstream Charter, one of the first fonts designed for laser printers. The font offers four family members: roman, bold, italic, and bold italic. Its design ...

* DejaVu *

Doulos SIL Doulos SIL (Ancient Greek for "slave") is a serif typeface developed by SIL International, very similar to Times or Times New Roman. Unlike Times New Roman, Doulos only has a single face, Regular. The goal of its design according to the SIL Inte ...

Linux Libertine Linux Libertine is a typeface released in 2003 by the Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create FOSS, free and open alternatives to Proprietary software, proprietary typefaces such as Times New Roman. It was developed with the free font e ...

* Taigi Unicode *

Source Sans Pro Source Sans (known as Source Sans Pro before 2021) is a sans-serif typeface created by Paul D. Hunt, released by Adobe in 2012. It is the first open-source font family from Adobe, distributed under the SIL Open Font License. The typeface is in ...

I.Ming
(8.00 onwards) fro
Ichiten Font Project
* Fonts made by justfont foundry * Fonts modified and release in GitHub repositor
POJFonts
: POJ Phiaute, Gochi Hand POJ, Nunito POJ, POJ Vibes, and POJ Garamond. * Fonts modified and released by But Ko based on

Source Han Sans Source Han Sans is a sans-serif East Asian gothic typeface, gothic typeface family created by Adobe Inc., Adobe and Google. It is also released by Google under the Noto fonts project as Noto Sans CJK. The family includes seven weights, and suppo ...

GenyogGensekiGensen
based on

Source Han Serif Source Han Serif (also known as Noto Serif CJK) is a serif Ming (typefaces), Song/Ming typeface created by Adobe Systems, Adobe and Google. Design Latin-script letters and numerals are from the Source Serif font. Changzhou SinoType Co., Ltd., ...

GenyoGenwanGenryu

Notes

Words in native languages

References

External links

({{webarchive , url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210808150321/http://www.ntcu.edu.tw/tailo/ , date=2021-08-08), Taiwanese Romanization System (Tai-lo) learning site by the

Ministry of Education An education ministry is a national or subnational government agency politically responsible for education. Various other names are commonly used to identify such agencies, such as Ministry of Education, Department of Education, and Ministry of Pub ...

Romanization of Hokkien Southern Min