17 Facts About Pinyin

Hanyu Pinyin, often shortened to just pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese in Mainland China, and to some extent, in Taiwan and Singapore.

Pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by a group of Chinese linguists including Zhou Youguang and was based on earlier forms of romanizations of Chinese.

Pinyin vowels are pronounced in a similar way to vowels in Romance languages.

Pinyin was created by a group of Chinese linguists, including Zhou Youguang who was an economist, as part of a Chinese government project in the 1950s.

Hanyu Pinyin was based on several existing systems: Gwoyeu Romatzyh of 1928, Latinxua Sin Wenz of 1931, and the diacritic markings from zhuyin .

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Pinyin system uses diacritics to mark the four tones of Mandarin.

Pinyin is used by foreign students learning Chinese as a second language, as well as Bopomofo.

Pinyin assigns some Latin letters sound values which are quite different from those of most languages.

Pinyin is purely a representation of the sounds of Mandarin, it completely lacks the semantic cues and contexts inherent in Chinese characters.

Pinyin is unsuitable for transcribing some Chinese spoken languages other than Mandarin, languages which by contrast have traditionally been written with Han characters allowing for written communication which, by its unified semanto-phonetic orthography, could theoretically be readable in any of the various vernaculars of Chinese where a phonetic script would have only localized utility.

Pinyin superseded older romanization systems such as Wade–Giles and postal romanization, and replaced zhuyin as the method of Chinese phonetic instruction in mainland China.

Pinyin has become the dominant method for entering Chinese text into computers in Mainland China, in contrast to Taiwan; where Bopomofo is most commonly used.

The Kuomintang party resisted its adoption, preferring the Hanyu Pinyin system used in mainland China and in general use internationally.

Tongyong Pinyin was made the official system in an administrative order that allowed its adoption by local governments to be voluntary.

Today, many street signs in Taiwan are using Tongyong Pinyin-derived romanizations, but some, especially in northern Taiwan, display Hanyu Pinyin-derived romanizations.

Hanyu Pinyin is used as the romanization system to teach Mandarin Chinese at schools.

Tongyong Pinyin was developed in Taiwan for use in rendering not only Mandarin Chinese, but other languages and dialects spoken on the island such as Taiwanese, Hakka, and aboriginal languages.