Hong Kong Government Cantonese Romanisation

The Hong Kong Government Cantonese Romanisation (not an official name) is the more or less consistent way for romanising Cantonese proper nouns employed by the Hong Kong Government departments and many non-governmental organisations in Hong Kong. It is not known whether there are strict guidelines for the method circulating in the government, or the method has just established itself and become a common practice over time. The system has been widely used by the Hong Kong Government from the very early days of British rule, and has since gone through some changes between the two World Wars.

The convention is similar to the one devised by Ernst Johann Eitel, which is likely German-based.

Since the method is not standardised, Hong Kong Education and Manpower Bureau has approved a Cantonese Pinyin system for teachers in primary and secondary schools. Besides this, the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong promotes their own Jyutping system. Both schemes are employed by the government to illustrate accurate pronunciation of Cantonese words.

This article illustrates and explains how the proper nouns in Hong Kong are transcribed and romanised, and lists the corresponding pronunciations of the spellings with respect to IPA and Jyutping.

The Hong Kong Government adopts the Eitel/Dyer-Ball system of romanisation, which is based on the spoken Cantonese language. It was first adopted in 1960 to standardise the romanisation of place-names throughout Hong Kong. The standardised place-names were published in the 1960 government publication "A Gazetteer of Place Names in Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories". Prior to this 1960 publication, there was no standard, consistent way of romanising place-names in the territory, which, predictably, often led to confusion. Since then, the romanisation system has been extended to the names of local Chinese, which gives romanised Hong Kong Chinese names a distinctive character.

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