JSL Romanization

Kanji

Kana

• Hiragana
• Katakana
• Hentaigana
• Man'yōgana
• Sogana

Uses

• Furigana
• Okurigana

Braille

Rōmaji

• Hepburn (colloquial)
• Kunrei (ISO)
• Nihon (ISO translit.)
• JSL (transliteration)
• Wāpuro (keyboard)

Punctuation

JSL is a romanization system for transcribing the Japanese language into the Latin script. It was devised by Eleanor Jorden for (and named after) her 1987 book Japanese: The Spoken Language.

The JSL system is based on Nippon-shiki romanization.

It is designed for teaching Japanese, and so, it follows the Japanese phoneme system fairly closely. For example, different conjugations of a verb may be achieved by changing the final vowel (as in the chart on the right), whereas the common Hepburn romanization may require exceptions in some cases, in order to more clearly illustrate pronunciation to native English speakers. In her book, Jorden says that this choice was made to ease the learning of Japanese grammar, and that relying on romanization to learn Japanese pronunciation is misleading as it is an approximation at best.

JSL differs from Hepburn in that it uses doubled vowels, rather than macrons, to represent the long vowels /oː/ and /ɯː/. Tokyo (Tōkyō) and Osaka (Ōsaka), for instance, would be written ⟨Tookyoo⟩ and ⟨Oosaka⟩ in JSL. Also, JSL represents ん, the syllabic n, as an "n" with a macron over it, ⟨n̄⟩, to avoid the practice that other systems use of sometimes writing ⟨n⟩ and sometimes ⟨n'⟩ depending on the presence of a following vowel or ⟨y⟩.

There is a close tie between Japanese pronunciation and JSL, where one consistent symbol is given for each Japanese phoneme (with the exception of double consonants, written in Japanese with the sokuon). This means that it does depart from Japanese orthography somewhat, as おう is romanized as ⟨oo⟩ when it indicates a long /oː/, but as ⟨ou⟩ when it indicates two distinct vowel sounds, such as in ⟨omou⟩ for 思う (おもう). It also distinguishes between ⟨g⟩, which is used when only a /ɡ/ sound is possible, and ⟨ḡ⟩, which is used when a velar nasal sound (the "ng" in the English word "singer") is also possible in some dialects of Japanese. The particles は and へ are romanized ⟨wa⟩ and ⟨e⟩, in accordance with their pronunciation. However, like Kunrei-shiki and Nihon-shiki, JSL does not distinguish between allophones in Japanese which are different phonemes in English.

JSL indicates the pitch of each mora. A vowel with an acute accent ⟨´⟩ denotes the first high-pitch mora, a grave accent ⟨`⟩ marks the last high-pitch mora, and a circumflex ⟨ˆ⟩ marks the only high-pitch mora in a word. In this system 日本 "Japan" would be written ⟨nihôn⟩ and 二本 "two (sticks)" as ⟨nîhon⟩. (This is why doubled vowels must be used instead of macrons.)