Hanzi → Cantonese Jyutping (粤拼) converter. The Hong Kong Linguistic Society standard (LSHK, 1993). 6 tones with optional IPA transcription.
Cantonese Jyutping Converter (粤拼)
How to use
Enter Chinese text
Simplified or traditional, single characters or full sentences — e.g. 香港 or 我爱广东话.
Pick output mode
Space-separated (best for reading), per-character table, or IPA transcription.
Convert
Instant Jyutping output. The 6 Cantonese tones are marked as digits 1-6 after each syllable.
Study side-by-side
Use table mode to learn each character's Jyutping + tone individually.
What Jyutping is, and why Hong Kong's signs spell differently
Jyutping (粵拼, jyut6 ping3) is the Cantonese romanisation finalised by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong at the end of 1993: 19 initials, a set of finals to which a and oet were added in 2018, and tones written as plain digits 1 to 6 after the syllable, with no accents.
Other schemes
Several romanisations are still in use: Yale, in textbooks such as Speak Cantonese from the 1950s; Sidney Lau's, from his 1970s textbooks; and the ILE scheme (教院式) of 1971. The English spellings on Hong Kong street signs, place names and identity cards are something else again: a government convention with no published spelling rules and no tones.
Six tones
Jyutping numbers the tones 1 to 6: high level, high rising, mid level, low falling, low rising and low level. The traditional count of nine is another way of counting the same tones: syllables ending in -p, -t or -k are counted as three extra "entering" tones, which Jyutping writes as tones 1, 3 and 6.
Why the signs cannot be predicted
We converted 2,870 official Hong Kong names to Jyutping (100 MTR stations, 68 Light Rail stops and 2,702 names in the Lands Department's gazetteer) and compared them with the official English. Of the 2,224 gazetteer names that are spelled out in full, giving each sound the first spelling in Wikipedia's comparison table gets 1,069 (48%) exactly right. Even giving every sound its most common official spelling matches only about 96% of syllables across all the names. Jyutping s is written sh 713 times and s 318 times, and the same cyun is Tsuen in Tsuen Wan but Chuen in Heng Fa Chuen. No converter can reliably turn a pronunciation into the official English name.
This tool uses CanCLID's open-source to-jyutping library (BSD-2-Clause), which picks readings by word (銀行 hong4, 行人 hang4). A single-character surname may get its everyday reading rather than its surname reading: 曾 (surname zang1), 區 (au1), 單 (sin6).
Where Hong Kong's official names part ways with Jyutping
香港 is hoeng1 gong2 in Jyutping. The "Hong" in the official name fits no fixed rule; it is an older spelling that long predates Jyutping.
In official names, Jyutping z is written ch 286 times and ts 249 times, and c is written ts 406 times and ch 201 times. So ch and ts do not mark aspiration.
Apply that fixed rule to the whole dictionary and 2,504 toned Jyutping syllables collapse into 437 spellings, about 5.7 sounds per spelling. "Tsam" alone stands for 21.
Many names are not transliterations at all: 金鐘 is Admiralty, 香港仔 Aberdeen and 赤柱 Stanley. Some go the other way, with the Chinese copying the English: 佐敦 Jordan, 柯士甸 Austin, 堅尼地城 Kennedy Town.
徑 is spelled Keng in 24 place names, and 坪 is Peng in Peng Chau: these spell the everyday spoken reading, not the dictionary readings ging3 and ping4.
Jyutping j is the y-sound (jat1, 一), the same letter the International Phonetic Alphabet uses for it. z is close to English j (zou6, 做) and c to ch (caa4, 茶).
Jyutping separates long and short vowels: 三 saam1 has long aa and 心 sam1 short a; 街 gaai1 and 雞 gai1 are another such pair.
Frequently asked questions
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No. Hanyu Pinyin writes Mandarin, with four tones; Jyutping writes Cantonese, with six. The letters differ too: Jyutping j is the y-sound.
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No. Street, place and identity-card spellings follow a separate government convention with no published rules and no tones: 紅磡 is hung4 ham3, officially Hung Hom. In our comparison a fixed rule spelled only about half of the spelled-out place names exactly right.
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Letters, digits and punctuation are kept as typed; only Chinese characters are converted.
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to-jyutping picks readings by word, such as 銀行 hong4 and 行人 hang4. A single-character surname may get its everyday reading: check 曾 (surname zang1), 區 (au1) and 單 (sin6).
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Yes. 啲 di1, 咁 gam3, 嘅 ge3, 咗 zo2 and others are in its dictionary.
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No. It converts standard Hong Kong and Guangzhou Cantonese only.
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IPA writes the actual sounds with phonetic symbols such as ŋ and ɔ. Jyutping uses only ordinary letters and digits, which are easy to type once you know its conventions.
Method & sources
How it computes
Chinese text is romanised character by character into Jyutping, the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong scheme: an alphanumeric syllable plus a tone digit from 1 to 6, with no diacritics. The romanisation is produced by the vendored to-jyutping library and runs entirely in your browser.
What this tool implements
- Jyutping as defined by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong (1993): alphanumeric syllables, six tones written as the digits 1-6, no diacritics and no non-ASCII symbols.
- Per-character output is shown alongside the running romanisation, so a reading you disagree with can be located rather than buried in a sentence.
- Cantonese is written in logographs, so a character with more than one reading (同形詞) can only be resolved from context. The upstream library reports high accuracy and the remaining errors land here, unflagged — a romanisation on this page is a best reading, not a certainty.
Sources
- The Jyutping scheme itself: Linguistic Society of Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme, proposed 1993. https://lshk.org/jyutping-scheme/ — alphanumeric throughout, no diacritics, six tones written as digits.
- to-jyutping v3.1.1, by the Cantonese Computational Linguistics Infrastructure Development Workgroup (CanCLID), BSD-2-Clause: https://github.com/CanCLID/to-jyutping — the library that produces the Jyutping. ⚠️ Its repository does not document which dictionary its pronunciation data comes from, so we cannot name that source without guessing, and this page does not.
What can make this go out of date
- The to-jyutping library is vendored at v3.1.1 and nothing refetches it. Upstream corrections to a character reading reach this page only when the vendored copy is updated, which is a review task.
Pick up where you left off
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