Tâi-uân Lô-má-jī Phing-im Hong-àn


The official romanization system for Taiwanese Hokkien in Taiwan is known as Tâi-uân Tâi-gí Lô-má-jī Phing-im Hong-àn, often shortened to Tâi-lô. It is derived from Pe̍h-ōe-jī and since 2006 has been one of the phonetic notation systems officially promoted by Taiwan's Ministry of Education. The system is used in the MoE's Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwanese Taigi. Its main differences with Pe̍h-ōe-jī are that it uses ts tsh instead of ch chh, u instead of o in vowel combinations such as oa and oe, i instead of e in eng and ek, oo instead of , and nn instead of .

Alphabet

The Taiwanese Romanization System uses 16 basic Latin letters, 7 digraphs and a trigraph. In addition, it uses 6 diacritics to represent tones.
Capital letterLower caseIPALetter name Letter name
Aaaa
Bbbibe
Eeee
Gggige
Hhhiha
Iiii
Jjjije
Kkkika
Khkhkhikha
Lllie-luh
Mmmie-muh
Nnnie-nuh
Ngngnginge
NNnninnenn
Oooo
Oooooooo
Pppipe
Phphphiphe
Sssie-suh
Tttite
Thththithe
Tststsitse
Tshtshtshitshe
Uuuu

  • nn is only used after a vowel to express nasalization, so it only appears capitalized in all-caps texts.
  • Palatalization occurs when j, s, ts, tsh are followed by i, so ji, si, tsi, tshi are sometimes considered multigraphs.
  • Of the 10 unused basic Latin letters, R is sometimes used to express dialectal vowels, while the others are only used in loanwords.

    Sample texts

; Tâi-lô
; Pe̍h-ōe-jī
; Hàn-jī
; IPA

Values

Consonants

Vowels & rhymes

A hyphen links elements of a compound word. A double hyphen indicates that the following syllable has a neutral tone and therefore that the preceding syllable does not undergo tone sandhi.

Computing

The IETF language tags register for Tâi-lô text.

Unicode codepoints

The following are tone characters and their respective Unicode codepoints used in Tâi-lô. The tones used by Tâi-lô should use Combining Diacritical Marks instead of Spacing Modifier Letters used by bopomofo. As Tâi-lô is not encoded in Big5, the prevalent encoding used in Traditional Chinese, some Taiwanese Romanization System letters are not directly encoded in Unicode, instead should be typed using combining diacritical marks officially.
Characters not directly encoded in Unicode requires premade glyphs in fonts in order for applications to correctly display the characters.

Font support

Fonts that currently support POJ includes: