The Kirby Encyclopedia:Japanese

Although many editors are not familiar with Japanese characters, specific Japanese words are often of interest in articles. In these cases, it is usually appropriate to provide a romanization of that word – in other words, to write it using the Latin Alphabet. Romanizations are also known as "rōmaji" or "romaji". Generally, romanizations are only appropriate for names, singular words or short phrases of interest, whereas translations are preferable for long passages.

General rules

 * Romanizations should be italicized.
 * Romanizations should be lowercase, except for titles (see below). Particles should always be lowercase.
 * Do not romanize katakana in all caps.
 * In addition to romanization, kanji can be phonetically rendered using  (insert the kanji and hiragana where indicated; do not use katakana for this purpose, unless it is used as furigana in the source). This appears as: KANJI (or, in practice, 漢字, kanji).
 * Subtitles are separated from the main title with a colon.
 * Do not italicize Japanese script to indicate titles, and instead of quotation marks, use 「 and　」.

Kana
For the most part, Hepburn romanization is used on this wiki, so the kana should be romanized according to the following table, which is based on the traditional Gojūon ordering, but also includes extended katakana often seen in names that originated outside of Japanese. This creates an almost complete coverage of all the consonant-vowel syllable combinations possible in English and Japanese, although extended katakana are not completely standardized in their usage, and romanizations other than those provided in the chart might be appropriate depending on the circumstances. The black-text kana, however, are fixed, and should be romanized as they are shown.

Except for cases where only katakana is present, hiragana are on the left, followed by katakana and then the romanization on the right. Please note that Kwa and Gwa each have two katakana combinations possible, which are listed side-by-side. The following chart explains the colour coding in the table.


 * Kana
 * Black kana = normal
 * grey = historic, now disused except for stylistic reasons
 * green = -u column katakana plus the vowel kana as digraphs (except abnormal fya/fyu/fyo, vya/vyu/vyo and tsyu, which use the regular digraphs)
 * red = abnormal
 * Romaji
 * Black romaji = primary consonant for the kana
 * blue = secondary consonant for the kana (for the digraphs, -ya/-yu/-yo become -a/-u/-o)
 * purple = tertiary (tsu, fu) or katakana-only consonant for the kana
 * red = abnormal
 * Backgrounds
 * Lighter background (first 5 columns) = monographs (normally)
 * Darker background (next 3 columns) = digraphs
 * Yellow backgrounds (last column) = abnormal -ye set of digraphs (katakana only)
 * Orange backgrounds (top row) plus dark yellow = vowels only (including y-)
 * Pink backgrounds = basic kana
 * Purple and blue backgrounds = kana with diacritics ( ゛ and ゜ respectively)
 * Green backgrounds = special cases
 * Light green = consonant-only n
 * Medium green = common punctuation marks
 * Dark Green = digraphs (note that 〜 is stylistic; it can also be used as a dash (-) or colon, among other uses)

Long vowels
To romanize elongated vowels, a macron should be typed over the vowel in question (see below for exceptions). In Japanese writing, vowels are elongated two different ways, depending on which kana are being used:
 * In hiragana, for the a, i and u sounds, it is done by following the first kana with a second kana of the same vowel sound. E.g. in the following chart, turning a single a sound into long ā is done by writing ああ, and turning a ka into kā is done by following the か ka kana with an a kana: かあ.
 * Note that long ē sound is usually made by using the い i kana instead of doubling the え e kana (e.g. えい ei or けい kei). Similarly, long ō sounds are usually made using う u kana instead of just the お o kana (e.g. おう ō or こう kō).
 * Occasionally in stylized writing (such as dialogue), 〜 is placed after vowel sounds to indicate a drawn-out sound, but should simply be romanized as a regular tilde (~). E.g. ね～ should be romanized as ne~, not nē.
 * In katakana, the specific ー symbol follows the sound that is elongated. E.g. アー is ā and カー is kā.
 * Long ō sounds may also be elongated the same way as hiragana, in which case the same rule applies (e.g. ロウ should be romanized as rō).
 * Sometimes a small kana might be used elongate the preceding vowel for stylistic reasons (e.g. for names, etc.), but should still be romanized the same way as if a ー symbol was used. E.g. ベビィマリオ should still be romanized as Bebī Mario even though the bi was elongated with a small i, as ビィ rather than ビー.
 * Stylized writing (like dialogue) might also use multiple kana (large or small) for drawn-out sounds, which can be romanized literally. E.g. ワアアア can be romanized as waaaa, not wā.

The chart on the right shows examples of elongated vowels (both plain vowels, and consonant-vowel syllables). Top row is hiragana, middle is katakana, bottom is romaji. Non-standard kana are in red (discussed above), and exceptions to the macron rule for romanization are in blue (discussed below).

Exceptions to using macrons
Both exceptions apply to words with long e and i sounds that originate in Japanese, rather than loanwords which use the regular macrons; usually, this means that when a word is written in hiragana or kanji, the long えい sound should be ei and long いい as ii, while katakana usually uses the macrons. E.g. 黄色 is romanized as kiiro, but ルイージ is romanized as Ruīji.

Be careful to distinguish between cases like 問 う and 糖. The former should be tou, while the latter should be tō. This is due to the fact that what looks like a long vowel in 問う is actually separated over two different morphemes, and so is pronounced as two distinct vowels ("to-u") rather than a single long one.

Some romanization systems or informal shorthands simply double all the elongated vowels to avoid using macrons, but this should not be done on the wiki except for the aforementioned ii cases. Elongated o sounds are sometimes rendered as ou, similar to the ei situation above, but this should be avoided on the wiki as it causes confusion with the two-syllable ou situations outlined above.

ん and ン
ん and ン should be romanized n in most circumstances (and not m, as in some other romanization systems). "N" is the only consonant that can occur without being followed by a vowel.


 * 日本 → nihon
 * こんな → konna
 * アンナ → anna

When ん or ン is immediately followed by one of the あ‐ or や-row kana (vowels and y-), it should instead be n', to distinguish it from the な‐row kana (n-) and indicate a syllabic break when spoken. E.g. 禁煙 is written as kin'en and pronounced "kin-en", as opposed to 祈念 simply being romanized as kinen and pronounced "ki-nen".

Small っ and ッ
When a small っ or ッ kana is followed by a consonant, it should be represented by doubling that consonant. This indicates that there is a slight pause before the following consonant sound when the word is spoken aloud. In cases where the consonant sound is a digraph in English (namely, "ch", "sh" and "ts"), only the first letter is doubled (see second example below). Note that っち should be cchi, never tchi, as it is in other romanization systems.


 * 閣下 → kakka
 * いっしょ → issho
 * クッパ → kuppa

Note that dialogue sometimes uses っ or ッ (or long strings of the kana) to indicate an elongated sound, such as hissing.

は, を, and へ
When used as particles, は, を, and へ should be romanized as wa, o, and e, rather than the usual ha, wo, and he, respectively. This is how they sound when pronounced. Katakana will only be used as particles when the writing as a whole is rendered as katakana (such as stylized dialogue, etc.): under normal circumstances, particles are always hiragana. In titles, particles should always be lowercase (see below).

Capitalization
While most full sentences should simply be translated, if romanized, only the opening word and proper nouns should be capitalized, as in English. Proper nouns and titles should always be capitalized in quotes, templates and, if no translations are available, in article titles (see below). However, if the names contain particles or honorifics, these should remain lowercase, as explained below.

Particles
Particles should always be lowercase in titles. As well as the aforementioned は wa, を o, and へ e, other basic particles found in titles include で de, が ga, に ni, の no, と to, and some common sentence-ending particles are か ka, ね ne and よ yo. Most particles are one syllable long, but some, such as から kara may be longer.


 * うみgreenなかgreenきけんgreenいっぱい！ → Umi green Naka green Kiken green Ippai!
 * ワンワンだgreen！ぜんいんしゅうごう！ → Wanwan Da green! Zen'in Shūgō!

Honorifics
While titles such as "Mr.", "Princess" or "Dr." come before someone's name in English, with Japanese honorifics, the titles come after the name as suffixes, and are attached with a dash (-). Common honorifics include さん -san, 君 -kun, ちゃん -chan and 様 -sama, while occupation-related titles frequently occurring in the Mario series include 姫 -hime (princess), 王子 -ōji (prince) and 先生 -sensei (teacher/professor/doctor, among others). This latter set of honorifics can also be used as standalone titles, rather than just as suffixes, in which case they are capitalized (last example).


 * マリオくん → Mario-kun
 * ショコラ姫 → Shokora-hime
 * フランクリ先生 　→ Furankuri-sensei
 * 先生 → Sensei

Subjects with Japanese names
If a subject must be called by its Japanese name per the naming policy, it should be romanized in all uses on the Super Mario Wiki. For the most part, the romanization rules outlined above should be followed, however, for article titles, words that originated in English should be written as the original English word for simplicity (or, if the word comes from another Roman script language such as German, it should be written in the original German, etc.). The only exception to this is if a word is part of a compound, as partially translating the word would look awkward.

Unlike regular romaji, the "title romanization" does not need to be italicized (unless it is a title of a game/movie/comic/etc., in which case it should be italicized anyway, as with English game/etc. titles). The proper romanization should still be provided (in italics) in the opening line of the article, while the "title romanization" is used whenever the name is used in the article and elsewhere on the wiki. Regular romanizations should always be used in, with the loanwords being converted back to English only in the "meaning" column.


 * スーパーマリオ　不思議 のころころパーティ
 * Normal romanization → Sūpā Mario Fushigi no Korokoro Pāti
 * Name romanization → Super Mario Fushigi no Korokoro Party
 * メンハンマー
 * Normal romanization → Menhanmā
 * Name romanization → Menhanmā (not "Menhammer")

For the convenience of editors who cannot easily type vowels with macrons, redirects should be created from titles without macrons to the canonical title. For example, should redirect to Menhanmā