Topic summary
Pinyin
The Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, commonly called Hanyu Pinyin or simply pinyin (pīnyīn), is the most common romanization system for Standard Chinese. Hanyu literally means 'Han language' — that is, the Chinese language — while pinyin literally means 'spelled sounds'. Pinyin is the official romanization system used in China, Singapore and the United Nations. Its use has become the standard method for transliterating Standard Chinese in most regions, though it is less commonly used in Taiwan. It is employed to teach Standard Chinese, normally written with Chinese characters, to students in mainland China and Singapore. Pinyin is also used by various input methods on computers and to categorize entries in some Chinese dictionaries.
In pinyin, each Chinese syllable is spelled in terms of an optional initial and a final, each of which is represented by one or more letters. Initials are initial consonants, whereas finals are all possible combinations of medials (semivowels coming before the vowel), a nucleus vowel, and coda (final vowel or consonant). Diacritics are used to indicate the four tones found in Standard Chinese, though these are often omitted in various contexts, such as when spelling Chinese names in non-Chinese texts.
Hanyu Pinyin was developed in the 1950s by a group of Chinese linguists including Wang Li, Lu Zhiwei, Li Jinxi, Luo Changpei and, particularly, Zhou Youguang, who has been called the "father of pinyin". They based their work in part on earlier romanization systems. The system was originally promulgated at the Fifth Session of the 1st National People's Congress in 1958, and has seen several rounds of revisions since. The International Organization for Standardization propagated Hanyu Pinyin as ISO 7098 in 1982, and the United Nations began using it in 1986. Taiwan adopted Hanyu Pinyin as its official romanization system in 2009, replacing Tongyong Pinyin.