Foochow Romanized

Foochow Romanized, a.k.a. Bàng-uâ-cê (BUC for short; Chinese characters: 平話字) or Hók-ciŭ-uâ Lò̤-mā-cê (Chinese characters: 福州話羅馬字), is a Latin alphabet for the Fuzhou dialect adopted in the middle of 19th century by Western missionaries. It had varied at different times, and became standardized in the 1890s. Foochow Romanized was mainly used inside of Church circles, and was taught in some Mission Schools in Fuzhou. But unlike its counterpart Pe̍h-ōe-jī for Southern Min Language, Foochow Romanized, even in its prime days, was by no means universally understood by Christians.