Usage
The Hong Kong Government adopts the Eitel/Dyer-Ball system of romanization, which is based on the spoken Cantonese language. It was first adopted in 1960 to standardize the romanization of placenames throughout Hong Kong (the standardized placenames were published in the 1960 government publication A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories, Hong Kong). Prior to this 1960 publication, there was no standard, consistent way of romanizing placenames in the territory, which, predictably, often led to confusion. Since then, the romanization system has been extended to the names of local Chinese, which gives romanized Hong Kong Chinese names a distinctive character.
For place names, the type of the place in English (e.g., "Street" and "Road") are often used instead of a romanization (which would have been "Kai" and "Lo" in the previous example), with just a handful of rare exceptions (for example, the “Fong” in “Lan Kwai Fong”, which would have been a “Square” if a translation were used). "Wan" and "Bay", "Tsuen" (or "Chuen") and "Estate" (or "Village"), are, however, equally common. Some places, such as "Un Long", was later renamed as "Yuen Long" according to this standard, with the exception "Un Chau Estate" / "Un Chau Street Estate". Nonetheless, the names "Hong Kong" and "Kowloon" are not transliterated based on this system, as they were already named as such prior to the founding of the colony.
When the romanisations are spoken in an English conversation, they are pronounced in a somewhat anglicised manner. All words are consistently pronounced in tone equivalent to the Yin Ping tone or tone 1. A good everyday example is the broadcast of station names on MTR trains.
Some instant messaging users, having problems typing in Chinese characters, model this rule of romanisation for communication, but they use voiced instead of voiceless unaspirated consonants, such as using 'b', 'd' or 'g' where this system may have used 'p', 't' or 'k'.
Read more about this topic: Hong Kong Government Cantonese Romanisation
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