Pinyin romanization

Pinyin romanization, system of romanization for the Chinese written language based on the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese. The gradual acceptance of Pinyin as the official transcription used in the People’s Republic of China signaled a commitment to promote the use of the Beijing dialect as the national standard, to standardize pronunciation across areas that speak different dialects, and to end the confusion in romanizing and alphabetizing Chinese characters.

National script reform began in 1913 with the creation of the National Phonetic Alphabet based on Chinese characters. Several attempts were made in the 1920s and ’30s to devise and promote a Latin alphabet for the Chinese language, but with little concrete success. After the communist takeover of China in 1949, work on a comprehensive script reform was begun. After considering and rejecting proposals for the use of either Chinese characters or the Cyrillic alphabet, the Latin alphabet was chosen for use. The resulting Chinese Phonetic Alphabet was adopted by the Committee on Language Reform in 1956 and modified in 1958. The island of Taiwan has continued to prefer the earlier Wade-Giles romanization system, although a modified system that is orthographically somewhat between Pinyin and Wade-Giles has been in limited use there since about 2000.

Pinyin was intended not to replace the Chinese characters but to help teach pronunciation and to popularize the Beijing dialect. The adoption of Pinyin also made it possible to standardize the spelling of Chinese personal and place names abroad. Beginning on Jan. 1, 1979, the State Council of the People’s Republic of China for Romanization prescribed that all translated diplomatic and foreign-language publications employ Pinyin in English-speaking countries and the Lessing-Othmer system in German-speaking countries. Chinese-language lessons for foreigners are conducted in Pinyin, and it is used for telegraphic codes, the Central Broadcasting System, braille for the blind, finger-spelling for the deaf, dictionaries, and indexes. Pinyin replaced the traditional writing systems of several ethnic minorities in China and has been used to document the previously unwritten languages of many more; a number of nonstandard characters have been devised to facilitate the writing of names transliterated from non-Chinese languages. It is also helpful for inputting Chinese characters when using a standard computer keyboard. Some interesting features of Pinyin are the clear and consistent way that distinctions are drawn between aspirated and unaspirated consonants (p, t, c, ch, and k are aspirated and b, d, z, zh, and g are their unaspirated equivalents) and the use of digraphs (zh, ch, and sh) for retroflex consonants. Pinyin also dispenses with the use of hyphens and reduces use of the juncture symbol (’) to a minimum.