Toward a Cross-Lingual Romanization Ecosystem for Sinitic Languages: A Paired Mandarin-Cantonese Case Study

Abstract:This paper proposes the Sinitic Romanization Ecosystem, a cross-lingual Sinitic romanization design framework with supporting digital infrastructure and a community-driven open-source workflow. The design framework addresses the lack of systematic cross-lingual romanization alignment among Sinitic languages through four design principles: phonetic correspondence for representing similar sounds with similar romanized symbols, historical-phonological correspondence for aligning cognate romanization strings, one-phoneme-one-symbol, and basic Latin-letter use, with a balancing consideration recognizing trade-offs among these principles. For the main paired case study, we devel-op CantRomZJ1 and MandRomZJ1, Cantonese and Manda-rin romanization schemes following the design framework, respectively. We also develop schemes for several other Sinitic languages, including Meixian Hakka, Shanghai Wu, and Nanjing Jianghuai Mandarin, following the same de-sign framework. To bring the romanization schemes into practical use, we develop open-source infrastructure for structured romanization storage, conversion, parsing, dic-tionary construction, and input-method generation. Finally, we evaluate the design framework through speech-to-romanization experiments based on Meta's Massively Mul-tilingual Speech (MMS) fine-tuning. Compared with the Pinyin+Jyutping baseline, our Man-dRomZJ1+CantRomZJ1 condition reduces Cantonese WER and CER by 7.80% and 10.61%, respectively. These results suggest that cross-lingual romanization alignment can improve transfer in low-resource Sinitic speech technology.

Accepted to ISCSLP 2026. Tan Lee and Benyou Wang are co-corresponding authors

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.29170 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.29170v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.29170 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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