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Concept
Pinyin
Summary
Hanyu Pinyin (), often shortened to just pinyin, is the most common romanization system for Standard Mandarin Chinese. It is used in official contexts where Standard Chinese is an official language (Greater China and Singapore) as well as by the United Nations and in other international contexts. It is used principally to teach Mandarin, normally written with Chinese characters, to students already familiar with the Latin alphabet. The system uses four diacritics to denote tones, though these are often omitted in various contexts, such as when spelling Chinese names in non-Chinese texts, and writing words from non-Chinese languages in Chinese-language texts. Hanyu Pinyin is also used in various input methods to type Chinese characters on computers, some Chinese dictionaries use it to arrange entries. The word () literally means "Han language" (i.e. the Chinese language), while () means "spelled sounds".
Hanyu Pinyin was developed in the 1950s, led by a group of Chinese linguists including Zhou Youguang, who based their work in part on earlier romanization systems. The system was originally promulgated at the at the Fifth Session of the First 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. Attempts to make Hanyu Pinyin standard in Taiwan occurred in 2002 and 2009, and while the system has been official since the latter attempt, "Taiwan largely has no standardized spelling system" so that in 2019 "alphabetic spellings in Taiwan are marked more by a lack of system than the presence of one". Moreover, "some cities, businesses, and organizations, notably in the southern parts of Taiwan, did not accept [efforts to introduce Hanyu Pinyin] due to political reasons, as it suggested further integration with the PRC", and so it remains one of several rival romanization systems in use, along with Wade–Giles and the autochthonous Tongyong Pinyin.
Official source
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