Standards Development

Scope

This International Standard applies to the information input, transcription, transliteration, encoding, interchange and storage of the Cantonese language, by manual or automated means.

Purpose

Cantonese, the standard variety of Yue Chinese, is the lingua franca of Hong Kong and Macau, and a major language in the Guangdong and Guangxi provinces of Mainland China. The language is also widely spoken among overseas Chinese.

This document is based on Hong Kong Cantonese, the variety of Cantonese widely spoken in Hong Kong. This variety is the most representative spoken variety in the Yue diaspora. As the de facto official spoken form of the Chinese language used in Hong Kong and Macau, it is officially used in education (including tertiary education), legislative, legal, and administrative domains. The total number of speakers is estimated to be 65 million.

Although Cantonese shares some vocabulary with Mandarin (the Romanization rules of which are detailed in ISO 7098), Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligible because of the differences in pronunciation, grammar and lexicon.

This International Standard provides a standard for the Romanization of Cantonese, which is based on today’s de-facto Cantonese Romanization standard, the “LSHK Romanization Scheme for Cantonese”, commonly called “Jyutping” (pronounced “yeut-ping” in English), developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.

The Jyutping Romanization system has been officially adopted by the Education Bureau of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region since 2003 for teaching Chinese to primary and secondary students in the territory. It is being used by nearly all tertiary institutions in Hong Kong for the instruction of Cantonese to non-native speakers.

The Jyutping system is uniformly used in authoritative dictionaries sold in Hong Kong and Macau. With its roots having been developed by linguistic experts from the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the Education University of Hong Kong, and the City University of Hong Kong, it is now the established primary tool for Cantonese linguistics research.

Jyutping is currently the most popular keyboard input method for entering Han characters using the Cantonese language. Out of the box support for Jyutping is available for multiple computing platforms, such as Microsoft Windows. Its popularity stems from the fact that Cantonese-speaking populations are unable to type out words using the Pinyin system (ISO 7098), especially for words that do not have counterparts in Mandarin Chinese -- both varieties of Chinese also utilize different characters and vocabulary to describe the same concept.

Standardizing a method for the Romanization of Cantonese will enable a number of use cases not possible before, including machine transcription and automatic translation, enabling educators and students of Cantonese, as well as for students who speak Cantonese, to benefit from stable and coherent learning rules of the language. 

Cantonese, the standard variety of Yue Chinese, is the lingua franca of Hong Kong and Macau, and a major language in the Guangdong and Guangxi provinces of Mainland China. The language is also widely spoken among overseas Chinese.

This document is based on Hong Kong Cantonese, the variety of Cantonese widely spoken in Hong Kong. This variety is the most representative spoken variety in the Yue diaspora. As the de facto official spoken form of the Chinese language used in Hong Kong and Macau, it is officially used in education (including tertiary education), legislative, legal, and administrative domains. The total number of speakers is estimated to be 65 million.

Although Cantonese shares some vocabulary with Mandarin (the Romanization rules of which are detailed in ISO 7098), Cantonese and Mandarin are mutually unintelligible because of the differences in pronunciation, grammar and lexicon.

This International Standard provides a standard for the Romanization of Cantonese, which is based on today’s de-facto Cantonese Romanization standard, the “LSHK Romanization Scheme for Cantonese”, commonly called “Jyutping” (pronounced “yeut-ping” in English), developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.

The Jyutping Romanization system has been officially adopted by the Education Bureau of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region since 2003 for teaching Chinese to primary and secondary students in the territory. It is being used by nearly all tertiary institutions in Hong Kong for the instruction of Cantonese to non-native speakers.

The Jyutping system is uniformly used in authoritative dictionaries sold in Hong Kong and Macau. With its roots having been developed by linguistic experts from the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the Education University of Hong Kong, and the City University of Hong Kong, it is now the established primary tool for Cantonese linguistics research.

Jyutping is currently the most popular keyboard input method for entering Han characters using the Cantonese language. Out of the box support for Jyutping is available for multiple computing platforms, such as Microsoft Windows. Its popularity stems from the fact that Cantonese-speaking populations are unable to type out words using the Pinyin system (ISO 7098), especially for words that do not have counterparts in Mandarin Chinese -- both varieties of Chinese also utilize different characters and vocabulary to describe the same concept.

Standardizing a method for the Romanization of Cantonese will enable a number of use cases not possible before, including machine transcription and automatic translation, enabling educators and students of Cantonese, as well as for students who speak Cantonese, to benefit from stable and coherent learning rules of the language.

Consider the following: Is there a verified market need for the proposal? What problem does this standard solve? What value will the document bring to end-users? See Annex C of the ISO/IEC Directives part 1 for more information. See the following guidance on justification statements on ISO Connect: https://connect.iso.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=27590861