Goal: Explore Romanization strategies
Note: A Romanization strategy is separate from an orthography.
Tip: You may choose to stick with IPA (at least for now).
Work focus: Learn/Brainstorm/Try
Romanizing your language means using the Roman alphabet to present the forms of your language. The major reason many conlangers consider a Romanization strategy is because it makes their work more easily sharable (no worries about special characters needed to type or view it, and it can be typed on any standard keyboard). Even if you’re not sure if you want to Romanize your language, it’s good to explore options so you can make an informed decision. You may decide an IPA presentation is best for you (at least for the moment). Before I go any further, I want to stress the fact that a Romanization strategy is not the same as developing an orthography for your language. (Orthography will be a decision to consider much later!)
For instance, let’s say you have these forms (presented here in IPA) in your language:
- æθɹo
- iʃel
- zɔɹɣa
A few issues are that not all fonts support these IPA characters, and standard keyboards do not include these symbols. That is, you need to download keyboards, use character selectors, or create your own keyboard to easily type the forms. Furthermore, not all word processors allow you to search a document using these characters (or at least not easily), making it difficult to search for particular forms in your language. And then you may find that when you send your work to someone else, it doesn’t render properly, and little boxes show up where some of the symbols should be.
This is where Romanization strategies come in handy—they are ways to attempt to use the Roman alphabet to reflect the sounds and forms in your language. It isn’t as precise as the IPA, which means that if you choose to Romanize your conlang’s forms, you need to first define how you are going to apply the Roman letters to your language’s sounds.
Going back to the three forms provided above, some sound are easily mapped to letters of the Roman alphabet, such as using <i> to represent [i] and <z> to represent [z]. Others are represented by common digraphs, such as <sh> being used to represent [ʃ] and <th> to represent [θ]. While some decisions are more easily made, you will likely come across some tricky spots, such as needing to decide how to Romanize [a] versus [æ]. You may find yourself in a position where diacritics are the best option, especially as you consider all the vowels in your language (there are only five vowels available in the Roman alphabet, after all!).
As an example, one option for Romanizing the three forms is presented here:
- æθɹo ~ áthro
- iʃel ~ ishel
- zɔɹɣa ~ zórgha
George Corley wrote an article for Fiat Lingua about his decision process when he chose to Romanize his conlang Middle Pahran. The article provides a lot of good advice for designing the strategy that will work best for you and your needs.
By no means do you have to Romanize your conlang. As you make your decision, consider the goals you set for your language and for how you want to share it (if at all) with others. Make sure you choose what will work best for your needs.