Hanyu Pinyin, or simplypinyin, officially theChinese Phonetic Alphabet, is the most commonromanization system forStandard Chinese.Hanyu (汉语;漢語) literally means 'Han language'—that is, the Chinese language—whilepinyin literally means 'spelled sounds'. Pinyin is the official romanization system used in China, Singapore, Taiwan, and by theUnited Nations. Its use has become common when transliterating Standard Chinese mostly regardless of region, though it is less ubiquitous in Taiwan. It is used to teach Standard Chinese, normally written withChinese characters, to students in mainland China and Singapore. Pinyin is also used by variousinput methods on computers and tocategorize entries in someChinese dictionaries.

In pinyin, each Chinese syllable is spelled in terms of an optionalinitial and afinal, 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), anucleus vowel, andcoda (final vowel or consonant).Diacritics are used to indicate the fourtones found in Standard Chinese, though these are often omitted in various contexts, such as when spellingChinese names in non-Chinese texts.

Hanyu Pinyin was developed in the 1950s by a group of Chinese linguists includingWang Li,Lu Zhiwei,Li Jinxi,Luo Changpei andZhou Youguang, who has been called the "father of pinyin". They based their work in part on earlierromanization systems. The system was originally promulgated at the Fifth Session of the1st National People's Congress in 1958, and has seen several rounds of revisions since. TheInternational Organization for Standardization propagated Hanyu Pinyin asISO 7098 in 1982, and the United Nations began using it in 1986. Taiwan adopted Hanyu Pinyin as its official romanization system in 2009, replacingTongyong Pinyin.

Matteo Ricci, aJesuit missionary in China, wrote the first book that used the Latin alphabet to write Chinese, entitledXizi Qiji (西字奇蹟; 'Miracle of Western Letters') and published in Beijing in 1605.^[1] Twenty years later, fellow JesuitNicolas Trigault published 'Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati' (西儒耳目資;Xīrú ěrmù zī)) in Hangzhou.^[2] Neither book had any influence among the contemporary Chinese literati, and the romanizations they introduced primarily were useful for Westerners.^[3]

During the late Qing, the reformer Song Shu (1862–1910) proposed that China adopt a phonetic writing system. A student of the scholarsYu Yue andZhang Taiyan, Song had observed the effect of thekana syllabaries andWestern learning during his visits to Japan.^[which?] While Song did not himself propose a transliteration system for Chinese, his discussion ultimately led to a proliferation of proposed schemes.^[3] TheWade–Giles system was produced byThomas Wade in 1859, and further improved byHerbert Giles, presented inChinese–English Dictionary (1892). It was popular, and was used in English-language publications outside China until 1979.^[4] In 1943, the US military tappedYale University to developanother romanization system for Mandarin Chinese intended for pilots flying over China—much more than previous systems, the result appears very similar to modern Hanyu Pinyin.

Hanyu Pinyin was designed by a group of mostly Chinese linguists, includingWang Li,Lu Zhiwei,Li Jinxi,Luo Changpei, as well asZhou Youguang (1906–2017), an economist by trade, as part of a Chinese government project in the 1950s. Zhou, often called "the father of pinyin",^[5][6][7][8] worked as a banker in New York when he decided to return to China to help rebuild the country after the People's Republic was established. Earlier attempts toromanize Chinese writing were mostly abandoned in 1944. Zhou became an economics professor in Shanghai, and when theMinistry of Education created the Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Written Language in 1955, PremierZhou Enlai assigned him the task of developing a new romanization system, despite the fact that he was not a linguist by trade.^[5]

Hanyu Pinyin incorporated different aspects from existing systems, includingMongolian,Latinxua Sin Wenz (1931), and thediacritics frombopomofo (1918).^[9] "I'm not the father of pinyin", Zhou said years later; "I'm the son of pinyin. It's [the result of] a long tradition from the later years of the Qing dynasty down to today. But we restudied the problem and revisited it and made it more perfect."^[8]

An initial draft was authored in January 1956 byYe Laishi, Lu Zhiwei and Zhou Youguang. A revised Pinyin scheme was proposed by Wang Li, Lu Zhiwei and Li Jinxi, and became the main focus of discussion among the group of Chinese linguists in June 1956, forming the basis of Pinyin standard later after incorporating a wide range of feedback and further revisions.^[10] The first edition of Hanyu Pinyin was approved and officially adopted at the Fifth Session of the1st National People's Congress on 11 February 1958. It was then introduced to primary schools as a way to teach Standard Chinese pronunciation and used to improve the literacy rate among adults.^[11]

Despite its formal promulgation, pinyin did not become widely used until after the tumult of theCultural Revolution.^[12]: 189 In the 1980s, students were trained in pinyin from an early age, learning it in tandem with characters or even before.^[12]: 200

During the height of the Cold War the use of pinyin system over Wade–Giles andYale romanizations outside of China was regarded as a political statement or identification with the mainland Chinese government.^[13] Beginning in the early 1980s, Western publications addressing mainland China began using the Hanyu Pinyin romanization system instead of earlier romanization systems; this change followed theJoint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the United States and China in 1979.^[14][15] In 2001, the Chinese government issued theNational Common Language Law, providing a legal basis for applying pinyin.^[11] The current specification of the orthography is GB/T 16159–2012.^[16]

Chinese phonology is generally described in terms of sound pairs of two initials (声母;聲母;shēngmǔ) and finals (韵母;韻母;yùnmǔ). This is distinct from the concept of consonant and vowel sounds as basic units in traditional (and most other phonetic systems used to describe the Chinese language). Every syllable in Standard Chinese can be described as a pair of one initial and one final, except for the special syllableer or when a trailing-r is considered part of a syllable (a phenomenon known aserhua). The latter case, though a common practice in some sub-dialects, is rarely used in official publications.

Even though most initials contain a consonant, finals are not always simple vowels, especially in compound finals (复韵母;複韻母;fùyùnmǔ), i.e. when a "medial" is placed in front of the final. For example, the medials[i] and[u] are pronounced with such tight openings at the beginning of a final that some native Chinese speakers (especially when singing) pronounceyī (衣; 'clothes'), officially pronounced/í/, as/jí/ andwéi (围;圍; 'to enclose'), officially pronounced/uěi/, as/wěi/ or/wuěi/. Often these medials are treated as separate from the finals rather than as part of them; this convention is followed in the chart of finals below.

The conventionallexicographical order derived frombopomofo is:

In each cell below, the pinyin letters assigned to each initial are accompanied by their phonetic realizations in brackets, notated according to theInternational Phonetic Alphabet.

In each cell below, the first line indicates theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcription, the second indicates pinyin for a standalone (no-initial) form, and the third indicates pinyin for a combination with an initial. Other than finals modified by an-r, which are omitted, the following is an exhaustive table of all possible finals.

The only syllable-final consonants in Standard Chinese are-n,-ng, and-r, the last of which is attached as a grammaticalsuffix. A Chinese syllable ending with any other consonant either is from a non-Mandarin language (a southern Chinese language such asCantonese, reflectingfinal consonants in Old Chinese), or indicates the use of a non-pinyin romanization system, such as one that uses final consonants to indicate tones.

Technically,i, u, ü without a following vowel are finals, not medials, and therefore take the tone marks, but they are more concisely displayed as above. In addition,ê[ɛ] (欸;誒) and syllabic nasalsm (呒,呣),n (嗯,唔),ng (嗯,𠮾) are used asinterjections or inneologisms; for example, pinyin defines the names of several pinyin letters using-ê finals.

According to theScheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet,ng can be abbreviated with the shorthandŋ. However, this shorthand is rarely used due to difficulty of entering it on computers.

Anumlaut is added to ⟨u⟩ when it occurs after the initials ⟨l⟩ and ⟨n⟩ when necessary in order to represent the sound[y]. This is necessary in order to distinguish the front high rounded vowel inlü (e.g.驴;驢; 'donkey') from the back high rounded vowel inlu (e.g.炉;爐; 'oven'). Tonal markers are placed above the umlaut, as inlǘ.

However, theü isnot used in the other contexts where it could represent a front high rounded vowel, namely after the lettersj,q,x, andy. For example, the sound of the word for 'fish' (鱼;魚) is transcribed in pinyin simply asyú, not as *yǘ. This practice is opposed to Wade–Giles, which always usesü, andTongyong Pinyin, which always usesyu. Whereas Wade–Giles needs the umlaut to distinguish betweenchü (pinyinju) andchu (pinyinzhu), this ambiguity does not arise with pinyin, so the more convenient formju is used instead ofjü. Genuine ambiguities only happen withnu/nü andlu/lü, which are then distinguished by an umlaut.

Many fonts or output methods do not support an umlaut forü or cannot place tone marks on top ofü. Likewise, usingü in input methods is difficult because it is not present as a simple key on many keyboard layouts. For these reasonsv is sometimes used instead by convention. For example, it is common for cellphones to usev instead ofü. Additionally, some stores in China usev instead ofü in the transliteration of their names. The drawback is a lack ofprecomposed characters and limited font support forcombining accents on the letterv, (v̄v́v̌v̀).

This also presents a problem in transcribing names for use on passports, affecting people with names that consist of the soundlü ornü, particularly people with the surname吕 (Lǚ), a fairly common surname, particularly compared to the surnames陆 (Lù),鲁 (Lǔ),卢 (Lú) and路 (Lù). Previously, the practice varied among different passport issuing offices, with some transcribing as "LV" and "NV" while others used "LU" and "NU". On 10 July 2012, theMinistry of Public Security standardized the practice to use "LYU" and "NYU" in passports.^[18][19]

Althoughnüe written asnue, andlüe written aslue are not ambiguous,nue orlue are not correct according to the rules;nüe andlüe should be used instead. However, some Chinese input methods support bothnve/lve (typingv forü) andnue/lue.

The pinyin system also uses fourdiacritics to mark thetones of Mandarin.^[20] In the pinyin system, four main tones of Mandarin are shown by diacritics: ā, á, ǎ, and à.^[21] There is no symbol or diacritic for the neutral tone: a. The diacritic is placed over the letter that represents thesyllable nucleus, unless that letter is missing. Tones are used in Hanyu Pinyin symbols, and they do not appear in Chinese characters.

Tones are written on the finals of Chinese pinyin. If the tone mark is written over ani, then it replaces the tittle, as inyī.

1. The first tone (flat or high-level tone) is represented by amacron⟨ˉ⟩ added to the pinyin vowel:

   ā ē ê̄ ī ō ū ǖ Ā Ē Ê̄ Ī Ō Ū Ǖ

2. The second tone (rising or high-rising tone) is denoted by anacute accent⟨ˊ⟩:

   á é ế í ó ú ǘ Á É Ế Í Ó Ú Ǘ

3. The third tone (falling-rising or low tone) is marked by acaron⟨ˇ⟩:

   ǎ ě ê̌ ǐ ǒ ǔ ǚ Ǎ Ě Ê̌ Ǐ Ǒ Ǔ Ǚ

4. The fourth tone (falling or high-falling tone) is represented by agrave accent⟨ˋ⟩:

   à è ề ì ò ù ǜ À È Ề Ì Ò Ù Ǜ

5. The fifth tone (neutral tone) is represented by a normal vowel without any accent mark:

   a e ê i o u ü A E Ê I O U Ü

In dictionaries, neutral tone may be indicated by a dot preceding the syllable—e.g.·ma. When a neutral tone syllable has an alternative pronunciation in another tone, a combination of tone marks may be used:zhī·dào (知道) may be pronounced eitherzhīdào orzhīdao.^[22]

Before the advent of computers, many typewriter fonts did not contain vowels withmacron orcaron diacritics. Tones were thus represented by placing atone number at the end of individual syllables. For example,tóng is writtentong². Each tone can be denoted with its numeral the order listed above. The neutral tone can either be denoted with no numeral, with 0, or with 5.

Briefly, tone marks should always be placed in the ordera, e, i, o, u, ü, with the only exceptions beingiu andio where the tone mark is placed on the second vowel instead. Pinyin tone marks appear primarily above the syllable nucleus—e.g. as inkuài, wherek is the initial,u the medial,a the nucleus, andi is the coda. There is an exception for syllabic nasals like/m/, where the nucleus of the syllable is a consonant: there, the diacritic will be carried by a written dummy vowel.

When the nucleus is/ə/ (writtene oro), and there is both a medial and a coda, the nucleus may be dropped from writing. In this case, when the coda is a consonantn orng, the only vowel left is the mediali, u, orü, and so this takes the diacritic. However, when the coda is a vowel, it is the coda rather than the medial which takes the diacritic in the absence of a written nucleus. This occurs with syllables ending in-ui (fromwei:wèi →-uì) and in-iu (fromyou:yòu →-iù). That is, in the absence of a written nucleus the finals have priority for receiving the tone marker, as long as they are vowels; if not, the medial takes the diacritic.

An algorithm to find the correct vowel letter (when there is more than one) is as follows:

1. If there is ana or ane, it will take the tone mark
2. If there is anou, then theo takes the tone mark
3. Otherwise, the second vowel takes the tone mark

Worded differently,

1. If there is ana, e, oro, it will take the tone mark; in the case ofao, the mark goes on thea
2. Otherwise, the vowels are-iu or-ui, in which case the second vowel takes the tone mark

The above can be summarized as the following table. The vowel letter taking the tone mark is indicated by the fourth-tone mark.

Tone sandhi is not ordinarily reflected in pinyin spelling.

Standard Chinese has manypolysyllabic words. Like in other writing systems using the Latin alphabet, spacing in pinyin is officially based on word boundaries. However, there are often ambiguities in partitioning a word.The Basic Rules of the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Orthography were put into effect in 1988 by the National Educational and National Language commissions.^[23] These rules became a GB recommendation in 1996,^[23] and were last updated in 2012.^[24]

In practice, however, published materials in China now often space pinyin syllable by syllable. According toVictor H. Mair, this practice became widespread after the Script Reform Committee, previously under direct control of theState Council, had its power greatly weakened in 1985 when it was renamed theState Language Commission and placed under theMinistry of Education.^[25] Mair claims that proponents of Chinese characters in the educational bureaucracy "became alarmed that word-based pinyin was becoming a de facto alternative to Chinese characters as a script for writing Mandarin and demanded that all pinyin syllables be written separately."^[26]

Pinyin superseded older romanization systems such as Wade–Giles andpostal romanization, and replaced bopomofo as the method of Chinese phonetic instruction inmainland China. The ISO adopted pinyin as the standard romanization for modern Chinese in 1982 (ISO 7098:1982, superseded by ISO 7098:2015). TheUnited Nations followed suit in 1986.^[5][27] It has also been accepted by thegovernment of Singapore, the United States'sLibrary of Congress, theAmerican Library Association, and many other international institutions.^{[28][failed verification]}Pinyin assigns some Latin letters sound values which are quite different from those of most languages. This has drawn some criticism as it may lead to confusion when uninformed speakers apply either native or English assumed pronunciations to words. However, this problem is not limited only to pinyin, since many languages that use the Latin alphabet natively also assign different values to the same letters. A recent study on Chinese writing and literacy concluded, "By and large, pinyin represents the Chinese sounds better than the Wade–Giles system, and does so with fewer extra marks."^[29]

As pinyin is a phonetic writing system for modernStandard Chinese, it is not designed to replace characters for writingLiterary Chinese, the standard written language prior to the early 20th century. In particular, Chinese characters retain semantic cues that help distinguish differently pronounced words in the ancient classical language that are nowhomophones in Mandarin. Thus, Chinese characters remain indispensable for recording and transmitting the corpus of Chinese writing from the past.

Pinyin is not designed to transcribevarieties other than Standard Chinese, which is based on the phonological system of Beijing Mandarin. Other romanization schemes have been devised to transcribe those other Chinese varieties, such asJyutping for Cantonese andPe̍h-ōe-jī forHokkien.

Based on the "Chinese Romanization" section of ISO 7098:2015, pinyin tone marks should use the symbols fromCombining Diacritical Marks, as opposed by the use ofSpacing Modifier Letters in bopomofo. Lowercase letters with tone marks are included inGB 2312 and their uppercase counterparts are included inJIS X 0212;^[30] thus Unicode includes all the common accented characters from pinyin.^[31] Other punctuation mark and symbols in Chinese are to use the equivalent symbol in English noted in to GB 15834.

According to GB 16159, all accented letters are required to have both uppercase and lowercase characters as per their normal counterparts.

GBK has mapped two characters⟨ḿ⟩ and⟨ǹ⟩ toPrivate Use Areas in Unicode respectively, thus some fonts (e.g. SimSun) that adhere to GBK include both characters in the Private Use Areas, and some input methods (e.g. Sogou Pinyin) also outputs the Private Use Areas code point instead of the original character. As the supersetGB 18030 changed the mappings of⟨ḿ⟩ and⟨ǹ⟩, this has caused an issue where the input methods and font files use different encoding standards, and thus the input and output of both characters are mixed up.^[31]

Other symbols are used in pinyin are as follows:

The spelling of Chinese geographical or personal names in pinyin has become the most common way to transcribe them in English. Pinyin has also become the dominantChinese input method in mainland China, in contrast to Taiwan, where bopomofo is most commonly used.

Families outside of Taiwan who speak Mandarin as a mother tongue use pinyin to help children associate characters with spoken words which they already know. Children start to learn it in kindergarten, but pinyin disappears from textbooks after primary school.^[32] Chinese families outside of Taiwan who speak some other language as their mother tongue use the system to teach children Mandarin pronunciation when learning vocabulary in elementary school.^[33]

Since 1958, pinyin has been actively used inadult education as well, making it easier for formerly illiterate people to continue with self-study after a short period of pinyin literacy instruction.^[34]

Pinyin has become a tool for many foreigners to learn Mandarin pronunciation, and is used to explain both the grammar and spoken Mandarin coupled withChinese characters. Books containing both Chinese characters and pinyin are often used by foreign learners of Chinese. Pinyin's role in teaching pronunciation to foreigners and children is similar in some respects tofurigana-based books withhiragana letters written alongsidekanji (directly analogous to bopomofo) in Japanese, or fully vocalized texts in Arabic.

The tone-marking diacritics are commonly omitted in popular news stories and even in scholarly works, as well as in the traditionalMainland Chinese Braille system, which is similar to pinyin, but meant for blind readers.^[35] This results in some degree of ambiguity as to which words are being represented.

Simple computer systems, sometimes only able to use simple character systems for text, such as the 7-bitASCII standard—essentially the 26 Latin letters, 10 digits, and punctuation marks—long provided a convincing argument for using unaccented pinyin instead of diacritical pinyin or Chinese characters. Today, however, most computer systems are able to display characters from Chinese and many other writing systems as well, and have them entered with a Latin keyboard using aninput method editor. Alternatively, some touchscreen devices allow users to input characters graphically by writing with astylus, with concurrent onlinehandwriting recognition.

Pinyin with accents can be entered with the use of special keyboard layouts or various other utilities.

Chinese text can be sorted by its pinyin representation, which is often useful for looking up words whose pronunciations are known, but not whose character forms are not known. Chinese characters and words can be sorted for convenient lookup by their Pinyin expressions alphabetically,^[36] according to their inherited order originating with the ancient Phoenicians. Identical syllables are then further sorted by tone number, ascending, with neutral tones placed last.

Words of multiple characters can be sorted in two different ways,^[37] either per character, as is used in theXiandai Hanyu Cidian, or by the whole word's string, which is only then sorted by tone. This method is used in theABC Chinese–English Dictionary.

Between October 2002 and January 2009, Taiwan usedTongyong Pinyin, a domestic modification of Hanyu Pinyin, as its official romanization system. Thereafter, it began to promote the use of Hanyu Pinyin instead. Tongyong Pinyin was designed to romanize varieties spoken on the island in addition to Standard Chinese. The rulingKuomintang (KMT) party resisted its adoption, preferring the system by then used in mainland China and internationally. Romanization preferences quickly became associated with issues of national identity. Preferences split along party lines: the KMT and its affiliated parties in the Pan-Blue Coalition supported the use of Hanyu Pinyin while theDemocratic Progressive Party (DPP) and its allies in the Pan-Green Coalition favored the use of Tongyong Pinyin.

Today, many street signs in Taiwan use Tongyong Pinyin or derived romanizations,^[38] but some use Hanyu Pinyin–derived romanizations. It is not unusual to see spellings on street signs and buildings derived from the older Wade–Giles,MPS2 and other systems. Attempts to make Hanyu Pinyin standard in Taiwan have had uneven success, with most place and proper names remaining unaffected, including all major cities. Personal names on Taiwanese passports honor the choices of Taiwanese citizens, who can choose Wade–Giles, Hakka,Hoklo, Tongyong, aboriginal, or pinyin.^[39] Official use of pinyin is controversial, as when pinyin use for a metro line in 2017 provoked protests, despite government responses that "The romanization used on road signs and at transportation stations is intended for foreigners... Every foreigner learning Mandarin learns Hanyu pinyin, because it is the international standard...The decision has nothing to do with the nation's self-determination or any ideologies, because the key point is to ensure that foreigners can read signs."^[40]

Singapore implemented Hanyu Pinyin as the official romanization system for Mandarin in the public sector starting in the 1980s, in conjunction with theSpeak Mandarin Campaign.^[41] Hanyu Pinyin is also used as the romanization system to teach Mandarin Chinese at schools.^[42] While adoption has been mostly successful in government communication, placenames, and businesses established in the 1980s and onward, it continues to be unpopular in some areas, most notably for personal names and vocabulary borrowed from other varieties of Chinese already established in the local vernacular.^[41] In these situations, romanization continues to be based on the Chinese language variety it originated from, especially the three largest Chinese varieties traditionally spoken in Singapore:Hokkien,Teochew, andCantonese.

In accordance to theRegulation of Phonetic Transcription in Hanyu Pinyin Letters of Place Names in Minority Nationality Languages (少数民族语地名汉语拼音字母音译转写法;少數民族語地名漢語拼音字母音譯寫法) promulgated in 1976, place names in non-Han languages likeMongolian,Uyghur, andTibetan are also officially transcribed using pinyin in a system adopted by the State Administration of Surveying and Mapping and Geographical Names Committee known asSASM/GNC romanization. The pinyin letters (26 Roman letters, plus⟨ü⟩ and⟨ê⟩) are used to approximate the non-Han language in question as closely as possible. This results in spellings that are different from both the customary spelling of the place name, and the pinyin spelling of the name in Chinese:

• Combining character
• Comparison of Chinese transcription systems
• Cyrillization of Chinese
• Romanization of Japanese
• Transcription into Chinese characters
• Two-cell Chinese Braille
• Chinese word-segmented writing
• Jyutping

• Chinese phonetic alphabet spelling rules for Chinese names—The official standard GB/T 28039–2011 in Chinese. PDF version from the Chinese Ministry of Education(in Chinese)
  • HTML version(in Chinese)