Guangdong Romanization

Guangdong Romanization refers to the four romanization schemes published by the Guangdong Provincial Education Department in 1960 for transliterating Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka, and Hainanese. The schemes utilized similar elements with some differences in order to adapt to their respective spoken varieties.

In certain respects, Guangdong romanization resembles the Mandarin Hanyu pinyin in its distinction of the alveolar initials z, c, s from the alveolo-palatal initials j, q, x, and in its use of b, d, g to represent the unaspirated plosive consonants /p t k/. In addition, it makes use of the medial u in the final before the rime rather than representing it as w in the initial when it follows g or k.

Guangdong romanization makes use of diacritics to represent certain vowels. This includes the use of the circumflex, acute accent, and umlaut in the letters ê, é, and ü, respectively. In addition, it uses -b, -d, -g to represent the coda consonants /p t k/ rather than -p, -t, -k like other romanization schemes in order to be consistent with their use as unaspirated plosives in the initial. Tones are marked by superscript numbers rather than by diacritics.