Romanization of Japanese - Kana Without Standardised Forms of Romanization

Kana Without Standardised Forms of Romanization

There is no universally accepted style of romanization for the smaller versions of the y kana (ゃ/ャ, ゅ/ュ and ょ/ョ) when used outside the normal combinations (きゃ,　きょ etc.), nor for the sokuon or small tsu kana っ/ッ when it is not directly followed by a consonant. Although these are usually regarded as merely phonetic marks or diacritics, they do sometimes appear on their own, such as at the end of sentences, in exclamations, or in some names. The detached sokuon is sometimes represented as an apostrophe or as t; for example, あっ might be written as a' or at.

Full-sized kana combined with smaller versions of the vowel kana ぁ/ァ, ぃ/ィ, ぅ/ゥ, ぇ/ェ and ぉ/ォ, mostly used to write loanwords, can be romanized in the "obvious way", reflecting the sound that they are meant to represent. For example, ディ, consisting of katakana de and small i, would typically be romanized as di. Sometimes this may create potential conflicts; for example if トゥ (katakana to and small u, used to represent sounds as in the English word "too") is romanised as tu, it may be confused with the Nihon-shiki and Kunrei-shiki romanizations of the kana ツ, also written tu. However, ツ is romanized as tsu in the Hepburn system, and since Hepburn is dominant among three systems, this kind of confusion is less likely to occur.

On a computer or word processor, smaller kana may be produced in various ways. For example, an "x" or an "l" preceding the romanization of the full-sized kana produces a small version on some systems, thus xtu gives "っ" on Microsoft Windows. However this is not standardized, and these forms are restricted to use in input systems; they are never used to represent the smaller kana in romanized Japanese.