Yale romanization of Korean

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Korean writing systems
Hangul
Hanja
Gukja (Yakja) Gugyeol Idu (Hyangchal)
Mixed script
Braille
Transcription
McCune–Reischauer Romanization of Korean (North) Revised Romanization (South) Bok Moon Kim romanization [ko] Kontsevich (Cyrillic) Kholodovich system [ru] (Cyrillic)
Transliteration
Yale (scholar) ISO/TR 11941 SKATS (coding)
v t e

The Yale romanization of Korean was developed by Samuel Elmo Martin and his colleagues at Yale University about half a decade after McCune–Reischauer. It is the standard romanization of the Korean language in linguistics.^[1]

The Yale system places primary emphasis on showing a word's morphophonemic structure. This distinguishes it from the other two widely used systems for romanizing Korean, the Revised Romanization of Korean (RR) and McCune–Reischauer. These two usually provide the pronunciation for an entire word, but the morphophonemic elements accounting for that pronunciation often cannot be recovered from the romanizations, which makes them ill-suited for linguistic use. In terms of morphophonemic content, the Yale system's approach can be compared to North Korea's former New Korean Orthography.^[2]

The Yale system tries to use a single consistent spelling for each morphophonemic element irrespective of its context. It represents some back vowels as digraphs rather than using diacritics (as done in McCune–Reischauer).

Yale may be used for both modern Korean and Middle Korean. There are separate rules for Middle Korean. Martin's 1992 Reference Grammar of Korean uses italics for Middle Korean as well as other texts predating the 1933 abandonment of arae a, whereas it shows current language in boldface.^[3]