Pinyin
Hanyu Pinyin, often abbreviated to pinyin, is the official romanization system for Standard Chinese in mainland China, and to some extent in Taiwan. It is often used to teach Standard Mandarin Chinese, which is normally written using Chinese characters. The system includes four diacritics denoting tones. Pinyin without tone marks is used to spell Chinese names and words in languages written with the Latin alphabet and also in certain computer input methods to enter Chinese characters.
The pinyin system was developed in the 1950s by many linguists, including Zhou Youguang, based on earlier forms of romanizations of Chinese. It was published by the Chinese government in 1958 and revised several times. The International Organization for Standardization adopted pinyin as an international standard in 1982, and was followed by the United Nations in 1986. Attempts to make pinyin standard in Taiwan occurred in 2002 and 2009, but "Today Taiwan 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 south of Taiwan, did not accept , as it suggested that Taiwan is more closely tied to the PRC", so it remains one of several rival romanization systems in use.
The word Hànyǔ means 'the spoken language of the Han people', while Pīnyīn literally means 'spelled sounds'.
, Hubei, text on road signs appears both in Chinese characters and in Hanyu Pinyin
When a foreign writing system with one set of coding/decoding system is taken to write a language, certain compromises may have to be made. The result is that the decoding systems used in some foreign languages will enable non-native speakers to produce sounds more closely resembling the target language than will the coding/decoding system used by other foreign languages. Native speakers of English will decode pinyin spellings to fairly close approximations of Mandarin except in the case of certain speech sounds that are not ordinarily produced by most native speakers of English: j, q , x, z, c, zh, ch, sh, h, and r exhibiting the greatest discrepancies.
In this system, the correspondence between the Roman letter and the sound is sometimes idiosyncratic, though not necessarily more so than the way the Latin script is employed in other languages. For example, the aspiration distinction between b, d, g and p, t, k is similar to that of these syllable-initial consonants English, but not to that of French. Letters z and c also have that distinction, pronounced as and . From s, z, c come the digraphs sh, zh, ch by analogy with English sh, ch. Although this introduces the novel combination zh, it is internally consistent in how the two series are related, and reminds the trained reader that many Chinese people pronounce sh, zh, ch as s, z, c. In the x, j, q series, the pinyin use of x is similar to its use in Portuguese, Galician, Catalan, Basque, and Maltese; and the pinyin q is akin to its value in Albanian; both pinyin and Albanian pronunciations may sound similar to the ch to the untrained ear. Pinyin vowels are pronounced in a similar way to vowels in Romance languages.
The pronunciation and spelling of Chinese words are generally given in terms of initials and finals, which represent the segmental phonemic portion of the language, rather than letter by letter. Initials are initial consonants, while finals are all possible combinations of medials, a nucleus vowel, and coda.
History
Background: romanization of Chinese before 1949
In 1605, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci published Xizi Qiji in Beijing. This was the first book to use the Roman alphabet to write the Chinese language. Twenty years later, another Jesuit in China, Nicolas Trigault, issued his Xī Rú Ěrmù Zī at Hangzhou. Neither book had much immediate impact on the way in which Chinese thought about their writing system, and the romanizations they described were intended more for Westerners than for the Chinese.One of the earliest Chinese thinkers to relate Western alphabets to Chinese was late Ming to early Qing dynasty scholar-official, Fang Yizhi.
The first late Qing reformer to propose that China adopt a system of spelling was Song Shu. A student of the great scholars Yu Yue and Zhang Taiyan, Song had been to Japan and observed the stunning effect of the kana syllabaries and Western learning there. This galvanized him into activity on a number of fronts, one of the most important being reform of the script. While Song did not himself actually create a system for spelling Sinitic languages, his discussion proved fertile and led to a proliferation of schemes for phonetic scripts.
Wade–Giles
The Wade–Giles system was produced by Thomas Wade in 1859, and further improved by Herbert Giles in the Chinese–English Dictionary of 1892. It was popular and used in English-language publications outside China until 1979.Sin Wenz
In the early 1930s, Communist Party of China leaders trained in Moscow introduced a phonetic alphabet using Roman letters which had been developed in the Soviet Oriental Institute of Leningrad and was originally intended to improve literacy in the Russian Far East. This Sin Wenz or "New Writing" was much more linguistically sophisticated than earlier alphabets, but with the major exception that it did not indicate tones of Chinese.In 1940, several thousand members attended a Border Region Sin Wenz Society convention. Mao Zedong and Zhu De, head of the army, both contributed their calligraphy for the masthead of the Sin Wenz Society's new journal. Outside the CCP, other prominent supporters included Dr. Sun Yat-sen's son, Sun Fo; Cai Yuanpei, the country's most prestigious educator; Tao Xingzhi, a leading educational reformer; and Lu Xun. Over thirty journals soon appeared written in Sin Wenz, plus large numbers of translations, biographies, some contemporary Chinese literature, and a spectrum of textbooks. In 1940, the movement reached an apex when Mao's Border Region Government declared that the Sin Wenz had the same legal status as traditional characters in government and public documents. Many educators and political leaders looked forward to the day when they would be universally accepted and completely replace Chinese characters. Opposition arose, however, because the system was less well adapted to writing regional languages, and therefore would require learning Mandarin. Sin Wenz fell into relative disuse during the following years.
Yale romanization
In 1943, the U.S. military engaged Yale University to develop a romanization of Mandarin Chinese for its pilots flying over China. The resulting system is very close to pinyin, but does not use English letters in unfamiliar ways; for example, pinyin x for is written as sy in the Yale system. Medial semivowels are written with y and w, and apical vowels with r or z. Accent marks are used to indicate tone.Emergence and history of Hanyu Pinyin
Pinyin was created by Chinese linguists, including Zhou Youguang, as part of a Chinese government project in the 1950s. Zhou, often called "the father of pinyin," worked as a banker in New York when he decided to return to China to help rebuild the country after the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. He became an economics professor in Shanghai, and in 1955, when China's Ministry of Education created a Committee for the Reform of the Chinese Written Language, Premier Zhou Enlai assigned Zhou Youguang the task of developing a new romanization system, despite the fact that he was not a professional linguist.Hanyu Pinyin was based on several existing systems: Gwoyeu Romatzyh of 1928, Latinxua Sin Wenz of 1931, and the diacritic markings from zhuyin. "I'm not the father of pinyin," Zhou said years later; "I'm the son of pinyin. It's 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."
A draft was published on February 12, 1956. The first edition of Hanyu Pinyin was approved and adopted at the Fifth Session of the 1st National People's Congress on February 11, 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.
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 the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and the PRC in 1979. In 2001, the PRC Government issued the National Common Language Law, providing a legal basis for applying pinyin. The current specification of the orthographic rules is laid down in the National Standard GB/T 16159–2012.
Initials and finals
Unlike European languages, clusters of letters — initials and finals — and not consonant and vowel letters, form the fundamental elements in pinyin. Every Mandarin syllable can be spelled with exactly one initial followed by one final, except for the special syllable er or when a trailing -r is considered part of a syllable. 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, i.e. when a "medial" is placed in front of the final. For example, the medials and are pronounced with such tight openings at the beginning of a final that some native Chinese speakers pronounce yī as and wéi as or. 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.
Initials
In each cell below, the bold letters indicate pinyin and the brackets enclose the symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet.1 y is pronounced before u.
2 The letters w and y are not included in the table of initials in the official pinyin system. They are an orthographic convention for the medials i, u and ü when no initial is present. When i, u, or ü are finals and no initial is present, they are spelled yi, wu, and yu, respectively.
The conventional lexicographical order, derived from the zhuyin system, is:
According to Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, zh, ch, and sh can be abbreviated as ẑ, ĉ, and ŝ. However, the shorthands are rarely used due to difficulty of entering them on computers and are confined mainly to Esperanto keyboard layouts.
Finals
In each cell below, the first line indicates IPA, the second indicates pinyin for a standalone 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.1The only syllable-final consonants in Standard Chinese are -n and -ng, and -r, the last of which is attached as a grammatical suffix. A Chinese syllable ending with any other consonant either is from a non-Mandarin language, or indicates the use of a non-pinyin romanization system.
1 is written er. For other finals formed by the suffix -r, pinyin does not use special orthography; one simply appends r to the final that it is added to, without regard for any sound changes that may take place along the way. For information on sound changes related to final r, please see Erhua#Rules.
2 ü is written as u after y, j, q, or x.
3 uo is written as o after b, p, m, f, or w.
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 and syllabic nasals m, n, ng are used as interjections.
According to Scheme for the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet, ng can be abbreviated with a shorthand of ŋ. However, this shorthand is rarely used due to difficulty of entering them on computers.
The ''ü'' sound
An umlaut is placed over the letter u when it occurs after the initials l and n when necessary in order to represent the sound . This is necessary in order to distinguish the front high rounded vowel in lü from the back high rounded vowel in lu. Tonal markers are added on top of the umlaut, as in lǘ.However, the ü is not used in the other contexts where it could represent a front high rounded vowel, namely after the letters j, q, x, and y. For example, the sound of the word 鱼/魚 is transcribed in pinyin simply as yú, not as yǘ. This practice is opposed to Wade–Giles, which always uses ü, and Tongyong Pinyin, which always uses yu. Whereas Wade–Giles needs of using the umlaut to distinguish between chü and chu, this ambiguity does not arise with pinyin, so the more convenient form ju is used instead of jü. Genuine ambiguities only happen with nu/nü and lu/lü, which are then distinguished by an umlaut.
Many fonts or output methods do not support an umlaut for ü or cannot place tone marks on top of ü. Likewise, using ü in input methods is difficult because it is not present as a simple key on many keyboard layouts. For these reasons v is sometimes used instead by convention. For example, it is common for cellphones to use v instead of ü. Additionally, some stores in China use v instead of ü in the transliteration of their names. The drawback is that there are no tone marks for the letter v.
This also presents a problem in transcribing names for use on passports, affecting people with names that consist of the sound lü or nü, particularly people with the surname 吕, a fairly common surname, particularly compared to the surnames 陆, 鲁, 卢 and 路. 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, the Ministry of Public Security standardized the practice to use "LYU" and "NYU" in passports.
Although nüe written as nue, and lüe written as lue are not ambiguous, nue or lue are not correct according to the rules; nüe and lüe should be used instead. However, some Chinese input methods support both nve/lve and nue/lue.
Approximation from English pronunciation
Most rules given here in terms of English pronunciation are approximations, as several of these sounds do not correspond directly to sounds in English.Pronunciation of initials
| Pinyin | English approximation | Explanation | |
| b | spark | unaspirated p, as in spark | |
| p | pay | strongly aspirated p, as in pit | |
| m | may | as in English mummy | |
| f | fair | as in English fun | |
| d | stop | unaspirated t, as in stop | |
| t | take | strongly aspirated t, as in top | |
| n | nay | as in English nit | |
| l | lay | as in English love | |
| g | skill | unaspirated k, as in skill | |
| k | kay | strongly aspirated k, as in kill | |
| h | , | loch | Varies between hat and Scottish loch. |
| j | churchyard | Alveo-palatal. No equivalent in English, but similar to an unaspirated "-chy-" sound when said quickly. Like q, but unaspirated. Is similar to the English name of the letter G, but curl the tip of the tongue downwards to stick it at the back of the teeth. Not like the s in vision despite the common English pronunciation of "Beijing". The sequence "ji" word-initially is the similar to the Japanese pronunciation of ji, but unvoiced unless toneless. | |
| q | punch yourself | Alveo-palatal. No equivalent in English. Like punch yourself, with the lips spread wide as when one says ee. Curl the tip of the tongue downwards to stick it at the back of the teeth and strongly aspirate. The sequence "qi" word-initially is similar to the Japanese pronunciation of chi. | |
| x | push yourself | Alveo-palatal. No equivalent in English. Like -sh y-, with the lips spread as when one says ee and with the tip of the tongue curled downwards and stuck to the back of the teeth. The sequence "xi" is similar to the Japanese pronunciation of shi. | |
| zh | nurture | Unaspirated ch. Similar to hatching but retroflex, or marching in American English. Voiced in a toneless syllable. | |
| ch | church | Similar to chin, but retroflex. | |
| sh | shirt | Similar to shoe but retroflex, or marsh in American English. | |
| r | ray | No equivalent in English, but similar to the r in reduce, but with the tongue curled upward against the top of the mouth. | |
| z | pizza | unaspirated c, similar to something between suds but voiceless, unless in a toneless syllable. | |
| c | hats | like the English ts in cats, but strongly aspirated, very similar to the Czech, Polish, and Slovak c. | |
| s | say | as in sun | |
| w | way | as in water. Before an e or a it is sometimes pronounced like v as in violin.* | |
| y | , | yea | as in yes. Before a u, pronounced with rounded lips.* |
;
Y and w are equivalent to the semivowel medials i, u, and ü. They are spelled differently when there is no initial consonant in order to mark a new syllable: fanguan is fan-guan, while fangwan is fang-wan . With this convention, an apostrophe only needs to be used to mark an initial a, e, or o: Xi'an vs. xian. In addition, y and w are added to fully vocalic i, u, and ü when these occur without an initial consonant, so that they are written yi, wu, and yu. Some Mandarin speakers do pronounce a or sound at the beginning of such words—that is, yi or, wu or, yu or,—so this is an intuitive convention. See below for a few finals which are abbreviated after a consonant plus w/u or y/i medial: wen → C+un, wei → C+ui, weng → C+ong, and you → C+iu''.
;
The apostrophe is used before a syllable starting with a vowel in a multiple-syllable word when the syllable does not start the word, unless the syllable immediately follows a hyphen or other dash. For example, 西安 is written as Xi'an or Xī'ān, and 天峨 is written as Tian'e or Tiān'é, but 第二 is written "dì-èr", without an apostrophe. This apostrophe is not used in the Taipei Metro names.
Apostrophes are omitted on Chinese passports.
Pronunciation of finals
The following is a list of finals in Standard Chinese, excepting most of those ending with r.To find a given final:
- Remove the initial consonant. Zh, ch, and sh count as initial consonants.
- Change initial w to u and initial y to i. For weng, wen, wei, you, look under ong, un, ui, iu.
- For u after j, q, x, or y, look under ü.
Tones
The pinyin system also uses diacritics to mark the four tones of Mandarin. The diacritic is placed over the letter that represents the syllable nucleus, unless that letter is missing.Many books printed in China use a mix of fonts, with vowels and tone marks rendered in a different font from the surrounding text, tending to give such pinyin texts a typographically ungainly appearance. This style, most likely rooted in early technical limitations, has led many to believe that pinyin's rules call for this practice, e.g. the use of a Latin alpha rather than the standard style found in most fonts, or g often written with a single-storey ɡ. The rules of Hanyu Pinyin, however, specify no such practice.
- The first tone is represented by a macron added to the pinyin vowel:
- :ā ē ī ō ū ǖ Ā Ē Ī Ō Ū Ǖ
- The second tone is denoted by an acute accent :
- :á é í ó ú ǘ Á É Í Ó Ú Ǘ
- The third tone is marked by a caron/háček. It is not the rounded breve, though a breve is sometimes substituted due to ignorance or font limitations.
- :ǎ ě ǐ ǒ ǔ ǚ Ǎ Ě Ǐ Ǒ Ǔ Ǚ
- The fourth tone is represented by a grave accent :
- :à è ì ò ù ǜ À È Ì Ò Ù Ǜ
- The fifth tone is represented by a normal vowel without any accent mark:
- :a e i o u ü A E I O U Ü
The words are "mother", "hemp", "horse", "scold", and a question particle, respectively.
Numerals in place of tone marks
Before the advent of computers, many typewriter fonts did not contain vowels with macron or caron diacritics. Tones were thus represented by placing a tone number at the end of individual syllables. For example, tóng is written tong².The number used for each tone is as the order listed above, except the neutral tone, which is either not numbered, or given the number 0 or 5, e.g. ma⁵ for 吗／嗎, an interrogative marker.
| Tone | Tone Mark | Number added to end of syllable in place of tone mark | Example using tone mark | Example using number | |
| First | macron | 1 | mā | ma1 | |
| Second | acute accent | 2 | má | ma2 | |
| Third | caron | 3 | mǎ | ma3 | |
| Fourth | grave accent | 4 | mà | ma4 | |
| "Neutral" | No mark or middle dot before syllable | no number 5 0 | ma ·ma | ma ma5 ma0 |
Rules for placing the tone mark
Briefly, the tone mark should always be placed by the order—a, o, e, i, u, ü, with the only exception being iu, where the tone mark is placed on the u instead. Pinyin tone marks appear primarily above the nucleus of the syllable, for example as in kuài, where k is the initial, u the medial, a the nucleus, and i the coda. The exception is syllabic nasals like /m/, where the nucleus of the syllable is a consonant, the diacritic will be carried by a written dummy vowel.When the nucleus is /ə/, and there is both a medial and a coda, the nucleus may be dropped from writing. In this case, when the coda is a consonant n or ng, the only vowel left is the medial i, u, or ü, 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 and in -iu 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 is as follows:
- If there is an a or an e, it will take the tone mark
- If there is an ou, then the o takes the tone mark
- Otherwise, the second vowel takes the tone mark
- If there is an a, e, or o, it will take the tone mark; in the case of ao, the mark goes on the a
- Otherwise, the vowels are -iu or -ui, in which case the second vowel takes the tone mark
Phonological intuition
The placement of the tone marker, when more than one of the written letters a, e, i, o, and u appears, can also be inferred from the nature of the vowel sound in the medial and final. The rule is that the tone marker goes on the spelled vowel that is not a semi-vowel. The exception is that, for triphthongs that are spelled with only two vowel letters, both of which are the semi-vowels, the tone marker goes on the second spelled vowel.Specifically, if the spelling of a diphthong begins with i or u, which serves as a near-semi-vowel, this letter does not take the tone marker. Likewise, if the spelling of a diphthong ends with o or u representing a near-semi-vowel, this letter does not receive a tone marker. In a triphthong spelled with three of a, e, i, o, and u, the first and third letters coincide with near-semi-vowels and hence do not receive the tone marker. But if no letter is written to represent a triphthong's middle sound, then the tone marker goes on the final vowel letter.
Using tone colors
In addition to tone number and mark, tone color has been suggested as a visual aid for learning. Although there are no formal standards, there are a number of different color schemes in use.- Dummitt's color scheme was one of the first to be used. It is tone 1 - red, tone 2 - orange, tone 3 - green, tone 4 - blue, and neutral tone - black.
- The Unimelb color scheme is tone 1 - blue, tone 2 - green, tone 3 - purple, tone 4 - red, neutral tone - grey
- The Hanping color scheme is tone 1 - blue, tone 2 - green, tone 3 - orange, tone 4 - red, neutral tone - grey.
- The Pleco color scheme is tone 1 - red, tone 2 - green, tone 3 - blue, tone 4 - purple, neutral tone - grey
- The Thomas color scheme is tone 1 - green, tone 2 - blue, tone 3 - red, tone 4 - black, neutral tone - grey
Third tone exceptions
Orthographic rules
Letters
Pinyin differs from other romanizations in several aspects, such as the following:- Syllables starting with u are written as w in place of u. Standalone u is written as wu.
- Syllables starting with i are written as y in place of i. Standalone i is written as yi.
- Syllables starting with ü are written as yu in place of ü. Standalone ü is written as yu.
- ü is written as u when there is no ambiguity but as ü when there are corresponding u syllables. If there are corresponding u syllables, it is often replaced with v on a computer to make it easier to type on a standard keyboard.
- After by a consonant, iou, uei, and uen are simplified as iu, ui, and un, which do not represent the actual pronunciation.
- As in zhuyin, syllables that are actually pronounced as buo, puo, muo, and fuo are given a separate representation: bo, po, mo, and fo.
- The apostrophe is used before a syllable starting with a vowel in a syllable other than the first of a word, the syllablw being most commonly realized as unless it immediately follows a hyphen or other dash. That is done to remove ambiguity that could arise, as in Xi'an, which consists of the two syllables xi an, compared to such words as xian.
- Eh alone is written as ê; elsewhere as e. Schwa is always written as e.
- Zh, ch, and sh can be abbreviated as ẑ, ĉ, and ŝ. However, the shorthands are rarely used because of the difficulty of entering them on computers and are confined mainly to Esperanto keyboard layouts. Early drafts and some published material used diacritic hooks below instead: ', ', .
- Ng has the uncommon shorthand of ŋ, which was also used in early drafts.
- Early drafts also contained the letter ɥ or ч, borrowed from the Cyrillic script, in place of later j.
- The letter v is unused, except in spelling foreign languages, languages of minority nationalities, and some dialects, despite a conscious effort to distribute letters more evenly than in Western languages. However, the ease of typing into a computer causes the v to be sometimes used to replace ü.
Words, capitalization, initialisms and punctuation
Comparison with other orthographies
Pinyin is now 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 that 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."
Because Pinyin is purely a representation of the sounds of Mandarin, it completely lacks the semantic cues and contexts inherent in Chinese characters. Pinyin is also 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.
Comparison charts
Unicode code points
Based on ISO 7098:2015, Information and Documentation: Chinese Romanization, tonal marks for pinyin should use the symbols from Combining Diacritical Marks, as opposed by the use of Spacing Modifier Letters in Bopomofo. Letters with combined tone marks are included in GB/T 2312 and the supersets, GBK and GB 18030, and thus Unicode includes all the common accented characters from pinyin.Due to The Basic Rules of the Chinese Phonetic Alphabet Orthography, all accented letters are required to have both uppercase and lowercase character as per their normal counterparts.
GBK has mapped two characters ‘ḿ’ and ‘ǹ’ to Private Use Areas in Unicode as U+E7C7 and U+E7C8 respectively, thus some Simplified Chinese fonts that adheres to GBK include both characters in the Private Use Areas, and some input methods also outputs the Private Use Areas code point instead of the original character. As the superset GB 18030 swapped the mapping of ‘ḿ’ and ‘ǹ’, this has caused issue where the input methods and font files use different encoding standard, and thus the input and output of both characters are mixed up.
Other symbols that are used in pinyin is as follow:
| Symbol in Chinese | Symbol in pinyin | Usage | Example |
| 。 | . | Mark end of sentence. | 你好。 Nǐ hǎo. |
| ，/、 | , | Mark connecting sentence. | 你，好吗？ Nǐ, hǎo ma? |
| —— | — | Indicate breaking of meaning mid-sentence. | 枢纽部分——中央大厅 shūniǔ bùfèn — zhōngyāng dàtīng |
| …… | … | Used for omitting a word, phrase, line, paragraph, or more from a quoted passage. | 我…… Wǒ… |
| · | Mark for the neutral tone, can be placed before the neutral-tone syllable. | 吗 ·ma | |
| - | Hyphenation between abbreviated compounds. | 公关 gōng-guān | |
| ' | Indicate separate syllables. | 西安 Xī'ān |
Other punctuation mark and symbols in Chinese are to use the equivalent symbol in English noted in to GB/T 15834.
In educational usage, to match the handwritten style, some fonts used a different style for the letter a and g to have an appearance of single-storey a and single-storey g. Fonts that follow GB/T 2312 usually make single-storey a in the accented pinyin characters but leaving unaccented double-storey a, causing a discrepancy in the font itself. Unicode did not provide an official way to encode single-storey a and single-storey g, but as IPA require the differentiation of single-storey and double-storey a and g, thus the single-storey character ɑ/ɡ in IPA should be used if the need to separate single-storey a and g arises. For daily usage there is no need to differentiate single-storey and double-storey a/g.
| Alphabet | Single-storey representation | Notes |
| a | ɑ | IPA // |
| a | α | Greek alpha, not suggested |
| g | ɡ | IPA // |
Usage
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. The ISO adopted pinyin as the standard romanization for modern Chinese in 1982. The United Nations followed suit in 1986. It has also been accepted by the government of Singapore, the United States's Library of Congress, the American Library Association, and many other international institutions.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 dominant method for entering Chinese text into computers 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. Chinese families outside of Taiwan who speak some other language as their mother tongue use the system to teach children Mandarin pronunciation when they learn vocabulary in elementary school.
Since 1958, pinyin has been actively used in adult education as well, making it easier for formerly illiterate people to continue with self-study after a short period of pinyin literacy instruction.
Pinyin has become a tool for many foreigners to learn Mandarin pronunciation, and is used to explain both the grammar and spoken Mandarin coupled with Chinese 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 to furigana-based books in Japanese or fully vocalised texts in Arabic.
The tone-marking diacritics are commonly omitted in popular news stories and even in scholarly works. This results in some degree of ambiguity as to which words are being represented.
Computer input systems
Simple computer systems, able to display only 7-bit ASCII text, long provided a convincing argument for using unaccented pinyin instead of 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 an input method editor. Alternatively, some PDAs, tablet computers, and digitizing tablets allow users to input characters graphically by writing with a stylus, with concurrent online handwriting recognition.Pinyin with accents can be entered with the use of special keyboard layouts or various character map utilities. X keyboard extension includes a "Hanyu Pinyin " layout for AltGr-triggered dead key input of accented characters.
Pinyin in Taiwan
Taiwan adopted Tongyong Pinyin, a modification of Hanyu Pinyin, as the official romanization system on the national level between October 2002 and January 2009, when it decided to promote Hanyu Pinyin. Tongyong Pinyin, a romanization system developed in Taiwan, was designed to romanize languages and dialects spoken on the island in addition to Mandarin Chinese. The Kuomintang party resisted its adoption, preferring the Hanyu Pinyin system used in mainland China and in general use 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 the Democratic Progressive Party and its affiliated parties in the pan-green coalition favored the use of Tongyong Pinyin.Tongyong Pinyin was made the official system in an administrative order that allowed its adoption by local governments to be voluntary. Locales in Kaohsiung, Tainan and other areas use romanizations derived from Tongyong Pinyin for some district and street names. A few localities with governments controlled by the KMT, most notably Taipei, Hsinchu, and Kinmen County, overrode the order and converted to Hanyu Pinyin before the January 1, 2009 national-level decision, though with a slightly different capitalization convention than mainland China. Most areas of Taiwan adopted Tongyong Pinyin, consistent with the national policy. Today, many street signs in Taiwan are using Tongyong Pinyin-derived romanizations, but some, especially in northern Taiwan, display 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 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. Official pinyin use 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.”
Pinyin for other languages
Pinyin-like systems have been devised for other variants of Chinese. Guangdong Romanization is a set of romanizations devised by the government of Guangdong province for Cantonese, Teochew, Hakka, and Hainanese. All of these are designed to use Latin letters in a similar way to pinyin.In addition, in accordance to the Regulation of Phonetic Transcription in Hanyu Pinyin Letters of Place Names in Minority Nationality Languages promulgated in 1976, place names in non-Han languages like Mongolian, Uyghur, and Tibetan are also officially transcribed using pinyin in a system adopted by the State Administration of Surveying and Mapping and Geographical Names Committee known as SASM/GNC romanization. The pinyin letters 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:
| Customary | Official | Traditional Chinese name | Simplified Chinese name | Pinyin for Chinese name |
| Shigatse | Xigazê | 日喀則 | 日喀则 | Rìkāzé |
| Urumchi | Ürümqi | 烏魯木齊 | 乌鲁木齐 | Wūlǔmùqí |
| Lhasa | Lhasa | 拉薩 | 拉萨 | Lāsà |
| Hohhot | Hohhot | 呼和浩特 | 呼和浩特 | Hūhéhàotè |
| Golmud | Golmud | 格爾木 | 格尔木 | Gé'ěrmù |
| Qiqihar | Qiqihar | 齊齊哈爾 | 齐齐哈尔 | Qíqíhā'ěr |
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.