Romanization of Khmer

The romanization of Khmer is a representation of the Khmer (Cambodian) language using letters of the Latin alphabet. This is most commonly done with Khmer proper nouns, such as names of people and geographical names, as in a gazetteer.

This article contains Khmer text. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Khmer script.

Cambodian geographical names are often romanized with a transliteration system, where representations in the Khmer script are mapped regularly to representations in the Latin alphabet (sometimes with some additional diacritics). The results do not always reflect standard Khmer pronunciation, as no special treatment is given to unpronounced letters and irregular pronunciations, although the two registers of Khmer vowel symbols are often taken into account.

When transcription is used, words are romanized based on their pronunciation. However, pronunciation of Khmer can vary by speaker and region. Roman transcription of Khmer is often done ad hoc on Internet forums and chatrooms, the results sometimes being referred to as Khmenglish or Khmerlish. These ad hoc romanizations are usually based on English pronunciations of letters, although they may also be influenced by Khmer spelling (as with the use of s rather than h to represent a final aspirate).

Since some sounds can be represented by more than one symbol in Khmer orthography, it is not generally possible to recover the original Khmer spelling from a pronunciation-based Roman transcription. Even transliteration systems often do not preserve all of the distinctions made in the Khmer script.

Some of the more commonly used romanization systems for Khmer are listed below. For full details of the various systems, see the links given in the External Links section.

This chart shows in full the three main systems for the romanization of Khmer: UNGEGN (or BGN/PCGN), Geographic Department and ALA-LC:

Various authors have used systems based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to transcribe Khmer. One such system is used in the books of Franklin E. Huffman and others;^[5] a more recent scheme is that used in J.M. Filippi's 2004 textbook Everyday Khmer or Khmer au quotidien.^[6] These systems differ in certain respects: for example, Huffman's uses doubling of vowel symbols to indicate long vowels, whereas Filippi's uses the IPA triangular colon vowel length symbol.