Revised Romanization of Korean | |
Hangul | |
---|---|
Hanja | 의 로마 |
Revised Romanization | gugeoui romaja pyogibeop |
McCune–Reischauer | kugŏŭi romaja p'yogibŏp |
The Revised Romanization of Korean (국어의 로마자 표기법; gugeoui romaja pyogibeop; lit. "Roman-letter notation of the national language") is the official Korean language romanization system in South Korea proclaimed by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism to replace the older McCune–Reischauer system. The new system eliminates diacritics in favor of digraphs and adheres more closely to Korean phonology than to a suggestive rendition of Korean phonetics for non-native speakers.
The Revised Romanization limits itself to the ISO basic Latin alphabet, apart from limited, often optional use of the hyphen. It was developed by the National Academy of the Korean Language from 1995 and was released to the public on 7 July 2000 by South Korea's Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Proclamation No. 2000-8, which cites these reasons for the new system:
Basic principles of romanization are:
These are notable features of the Revised Romanization system:
In addition, special provisions are for regular phonological rules in exceptions to transliteration (see Korean phonology).
Other rules and recommendations include the following:
Like several European languages that have undergone spelling simplifications (such as Portuguese, German or Swedish), the Revised Romanization is not expected to be adopted as the official romanization of Korean family names, and few people have voluntarily adopted it. According to a 2009 study by the National Institute of the Korean Language based on 63,351 applications for South Korean passports in 2007, for each of the three most common surnames Kim (김), Lee (이), and Park (박), less than 2% of applicants asked for their surname to be romanized in their passport by using the respective Revised Romanization spelling Gim, I, or Bak. Given names and commercial names are encouraged to change, but it is not required.