Pinyin

Syllables

Chinese phonology is generally described in terms of 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 syllable er or when a trailing -r is considered part of a syllable (a phenomenon known as erhua). The latter case, though a common practice in some sub-dialects, is rarely used in official publications.

While initials are usually a single 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 and are pronounced with such tight openings at the beginning of a final that some native Chinese speakers (especially when singing) pronounce yī (衣; 'clothes'), officially pronounced , as and wéi (围; 圍; 'to enclose'), officially pronounced , 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

The conventional lexicographical order derived from Bopomofo is:

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

Finals

In each cell below, the first line indicates the International 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 grammatical suffix. A Chinese syllable ending with any other consonant either is from a non-Mandarin language (a southern Chinese language such as Cantonese, reflecting final 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 (欸; 誒) and syllabic nasals m (呒, 呣), n (嗯, 唔), ng (嗯, 𠮾) are used as interjections or in neologisms; for example, pinyin defines the names of several pinyin letters using -ê finals.

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

The ⟨ü⟩ sound

An umlaut is added to ⟨⟩ when it occurs after the initials ⟨⟩ and ⟨⟩ when necessary in order to represent the sound . This is necessary in order to distinguish the front high rounded vowel in lü (e.g. 驴; 驢; 'donkey') from the back high rounded vowel in lu (e.g. 炉; 爐; 'oven'). Tonal markers are placed above 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 for 'fish' (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 the umlaut to distinguish between chü (pinyin ju) and chu (pinyin zhu), 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 a lack of precomposed characters and limited font support for combining accents on 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 (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, 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 (typing v for ü) and nue/lue.

Tones

The pinyin system also uses four diacritics to mark the tones of Mandarin. In the pinyin system, four main tones of Mandarin are shown by diacritics: ā, á, ǎ, and à. There is no symbol or diacritic for the neutral tone: a. The diacritic is placed over the letter that represents the syllable 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 an i, then it replaces the tittle, as in yī.

1. The first tone (flat or high-level tone) is represented by a macron ⟨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 an acute 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 a caron ⟨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 a grave 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 either zhīdào or zhīdao.

Numbers

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. 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.

Placement and omission

Briefly, tone marks should always be placed in the order a, e, o, i, u, ü, with the only exception being iu where the tone mark is placed on the second vowel instead. Pinyin tone marks appear primarily above the syllable nucleus—e.g. as in kuài, where k is the initial, u the medial, a the nucleus, and i is the coda. There is an exception for syllabic nasals like , where the nucleus of the syllable is a consonant: there, the diacritic will be carried by a written dummy vowel.

When the nucleus is (written e or o), 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 (from wei: wèi → -uì) and in -iu (from you: 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 an a or an e, it will take the tone mark
2. In the combination ou, then the o takes the tone mark
3. Otherwise, the second vowel takes the tone mark

Worded differently,

1. 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
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

Tone sandhi is not ordinarily reflected in pinyin spelling.

Spacing

Standard Chinese has many polysyllabic 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. These rules became a GB recommendation in 1996, and were last updated in 2012.

In practice, however, published materials in China now often space pinyin syllable by syllable. According to Victor H. Mair, this practice became widespread after the Script Reform Committee, previously under direct control of the State Council, had its power greatly weakened in 1985 when it was renamed the State Language Commission and placed under the Ministry of Education. 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."

Comparison with other orthographies

Pinyin superseded older romanization systems such as Wade–Giles and postal romanization, and replaced bopomofo as the method of Chinese phonetic instruction in mainland China. The ISO adopted pinyin as the standard romanization for modern Chinese in 1982 (ISO 7098:1982, superseded by ISO 7098:2015). 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.

Compared to Wade–Giles, pinyin more accurately reflects the aspiration distinction for English speakers, but 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 to pinyin, since many languages that use the Latin alphabet natively also assign different values to the same letters. A 2014 overview of topics in Chinese writing and literacy claimed, "By and large, pinyin represents the Chinese sounds better than the Wade–Giles system, and does so with fewer extra marks.".

As pinyin is a phonetic writing system for modern Standard Chinese, it is not designed to replace characters for writing Literary 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 now homophones in Mandarin. Thus, Chinese characters remain indispensable for recording and transmitting the corpus of Chinese writing from the past.

Pinyin is not designed to transcribe varieties 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 as Jyutping for Cantonese and Pe̍h-ōe-jī for Hokkien.

Comparison charts

Typography and encoding

Based on the "Chinese Romanization" section of ISO 7098:2015, pinyin tone marks should use the symbols from Combining Diacritical Marks, as opposed by the use of Spacing Modifier Letters in bopomofo. Lowercase letters with tone marks are included in GB 2312 and their uppercase counterparts are included in JIS X 0212; thus Unicode includes all the common accented characters from pinyin. 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⟩ to Private 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 superset GB 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.

Other symbols are used in pinyin are as follows:

It is commonly recommended that pinyin annotations use a typeface with a single-story 'a' (ɑ) and 'g' (g) and a second-tone mark (◌́) that is thicker at the bottom. However, there is no official restriction on the form of 'a' and 'g'.

Usage

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 Chinese 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. 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.

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 non-native speakers 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 non-native speakers learning Chinese. Pinyin's role in teaching pronunciation to non-native speakers and children is similar in some respects to furigana-based books with hiragana letters written alongside kanji (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 traditional Mainland Chinese Braille system, which is similar to pinyin, but meant for blind readers. This results in some degree of ambiguity as to which words are being represented.

Computer input

Simple computer systems, sometimes only able to use simple character systems for text, such as the 7-bit ASCII 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 an input method editor. Alternatively, some touchscreen devices 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 other utilities.

Sorting techniques

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. 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, either per character, as is used in the Xiandai Hanyu Cidian, or by the whole word's string, which is only then sorted by tone. This method is used in the ABC Chinese–English Dictionary.

By region

Taiwan

Between October 2002 and January 2009, Taiwan used Tongyong 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 ruling Kuomintang (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 the Democratic 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, 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. 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."

Singapore

Singapore implemented Hanyu Pinyin as the official romanization system for Mandarin in the public sector starting in the 1980s, in conjunction with the Speak Mandarin Campaign. Hanyu Pinyin is also used as the romanization system to teach Mandarin Chinese at schools. 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. 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, and Cantonese.

Special names

In accordance to the Regulation 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 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 (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: