Naxi is romanised in Naxi pinyin, the system used by the standard dictionaries (Pinson/Webonary and others). Its letters are not Mandarin letters: q, v, ee and iu encode Naxi vowels and tones, and consonant letters like dd and bb mark specific phonation, not double sounds. Because a romanised spelling alone is ambiguous, this project's dictionary gives an IPA transcription alongside every headword: for example kuel lieq “good luck” is [kʰwə⁵⁵lʝə¹¹].
Romanisation conventions differ between sources — Rock's 1930s system, the Sinological transcriptions in Chinese publications, and modern Naxi pinyin all spell the same word differently. IPA, though, means the same thing everywhere, which is why every entry in the dictionary carries both.
Naxi is tonal. The dictionary records tone with the IPA numerals (for example [e⁵⁵]) and, where a source used one, a tone value field. Two words spelled the same in a romanisation can differ only in tone.
Open any of these and compare the romanisation with the IPA:
Recordings of Naxi narratives with aligned transcription are held in the Pangloss collection (CNRS), one of the sources aggregated into this dictionary. Where an entry has an attached recording, its URL is stored with the entry.
NaxiAI. “How is Naxi pronounced?” https://naxiai.com/naxi-pronunciation.