Roman transcription of Khmer is often done ad hoc on Internet forums and chatrooms, the results sometimes being referred to as Khmenglish or Khmerlish.
These ad hoc romanizations are usually based on English pronunciations of letters, although they may also be influenced by Khmer spelling (as with the use of s rather than h to represent a final aspirate).
The Khmer romanization scheme published by the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names is based on the BGN/PCGN system, described below.
The Geographic Department of the Cambodian Ministry of Land Management and Urban Planning has developed a modified version of the UNGEGN system,[2] originally put forward in 1995, and used in the second edition of the Gazetteer of Cambodia in 1996.
This chart shows in full the three main systems for the romanization of Khmer: UNGEGN (or BGN/PCGN), Geographic Department and ALA-LC: 1st series 2nd series[note 1] [Note 2] Various authors have used systems based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to transcribe Khmer.