The romanization of Chinese language is the use of Latin alphabet to write the Chinese language. Chinese has been written in Chinese characters since about 1500 B.C., and while changes in style and degree of stylization have changed over time, there is a historical continuity between the early forms and the later forms. Because of the nature of Chinese characters, i.e., because they do not depend on symbolic representations of sounds to indicate meaning, there has always been a problem in things like dictionaries of how to indicate the pronunciation of a character. In linguistics, romanization (or Latinization, also spelled romanisation or Latinisation) is the representation of a word or language with the Roman (Latin) alphabet, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system. ... The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... Chinese (written) language (pinyin: zhōngw n) written in Chinese characters The Chinese language (汉语/漢語, 华语/華語, or 中文; Pinyin: H nyǔ, Hu yǔ, or Zhōngw n) is a member of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. ... Technical note: Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ...

The traditional Chinese method of indicating pronunciations involves writing two characters, the first of which gives the initial consonant of the character being glossed and the second of which indicates the vowel, its final consonant (if present), and its tone. For cases when a suitable character could not be found to indicate the proper tone, a tiny circle (either empty of filled) could be written at one or another of the four corners of the character. To create a successful system of romanization, the same information had to be clearly indicated.

There may have been informal systems of romanization used from the time the first literate non-Chinese tried to learn Chinese, but there can be no definitive proof of any first instance of phonetic representation by a non-Chinese writing system. As for more systematic attempts, such as those invented by religious organizations, the historical record is more clear.

Early Catholic missionaries from Europe used Latin as their international language, and the names of some of the most famous of early Chinese thinkers are still commonly found in their Latinized form today. For instance, "Confucius" can be analyzed into four parts, "con" (a regional version of the sound of the Chinese family name Kung), "fu" (a very straightforward spelling of what is represented in common romanization systems of today with the same letters), "ci" (a stand-in for the "dz" sound written "tzu" in the Wade-Giles system), "dz" in the Yale system, and "zi" in pinyin), and "us" which was added to give the name the proper Latin form for the name of a male human. The "fuci" part of the name means "grand master," so the whole thing represents the appellation "Grand Master Kong." Similarly, the second most important Confucian is named "Mencius" in the English of today. It consists of "meng" (a common Chinese surname), "ci" (spelled "tzu" or "zi" today, and meaning "master"), and the male ending. So his Latin name means "Master Meng."

The most linguistically comprehensive system was made by the Protestants. In their missionary activities they had contact with many languages in South-east Asia, and they created a system that could be used consistently across all of the languages they were concerned with.

Herbert Giles made a revision of the romanized pronunciations of the several Chinese regional languages (and even non-Chinese languages that were written using Chinese characters), and his romanization system was modified by Wade, giving us the system still used by some writers today but largely relegated to scholarly writing after the Nixon mission to China. This system is generally called the "Wade-Giles" system.

Several examples of Hanyu Pinyin and Wade-Giles, two methods of romanization,

During World War II, the Army Language School in the United States needed to speed the teaching of survival Chinese to pilots and others who might have to communicate on the battlefield with Chinese who knew no English. They cooperated with Yale University and part of their success was due to the creation of a system of romanization that would not cause problems by departing unexpectedly from English decoding skills. The ideal was that if a person who spoke standard English read something in romanized Chinese the result would have been comprehensible to native speakers of Mandarin Chinese.

What suits the decoding skills of native speakers of English will not be of great benefit to native speakers of French, German, or other languages that assign different values to some letters of the alphabet. After World War II had ended, scholars felt the need for a system that could be used across national and linguistic boundaries. At that time the pinyin system used in mainland China came into favor with many.

The pinyin system was a native Chinese system that was actually invented by Chinese expatriates in Vladivostok. During the early years of the Chinese Republic, Chinese linguists took as their model the kana syllabaries by which sounds were noted in Japanese. They made their own system, called the "National Phonetic Alphabet" (or zhuyin fuhao). It was quite adequate for teaching correct Mandarin pronunciation to non-Mandarin students and to noting pronunciations in dictionaries, but it was not easy to incorporate into teaching materials unless the individual teacher happened to own a Chinese typewriter. Zhuyin fuhao (Traditional Chinese: ; Simplified Chinese: ; Hanyu Pinyin: ; Tongyong Pinyin: ; Wade-Giles: Chu-yin fu-hao), or Symbols for Annotating Sounds, often abbreviated as Zhuyin, or known as Bopomofo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) after the first four letters of this Chinese phonemic alphabet (bo po mo fo), is the national phonetic system of the...

The expatriate Chinese population in Vladivostok needed some way to teach Chinese to their own children, and conduct other simple communication tasks. They decided to use Western typewriters to spell out Chinese sounds, and the natural way to accomplish this task was to map the zhuyin fuhao to single Roman letters (in most cases) or to pairs of Roman letters after they had exhausted all the possibilities for single equivalents.

Competing systems of notation include the French-based Postal System romanizations (still seen in some romanizations of place names, Cyrillic systems, systems intended for speakers of French and German, and various other areas).

Regardless of the romanization method, the words are pronounced the same. Learning a system of romanization requires occasional deviations from the learner's own language, so, for example, Hanyu Pinyin uses "q" for very different values than an English speaker would probably be used to; the sound represented is similar to the English "ch," but pronounced further forward (an aspirated alveolo-palatal fricative, /tɕʰ/). This is a cause of confusion but is unavoidable, as any language transcribed, there will be phonemes different from those of the learner's own. On the other hand, this can be beneficial, since learners can immediately be made aware of the fact that they will have to learn a new pronunciation. With languages that use similar orthography, the temptation to pronounce words just as in one's mother tongue can lead to great misunderstanding. Pinyin (拼音, Pīnyīn) literally means join (together) sounds (a less literal translation being phoneticize, spell or transcription) in Chinese and usually refers to Hànyǔ Pīnyīn (汉语拼音, literal meaning: Han language pinyin), which is a system of... The orthography of a language is the set of symbols (glyphs and diacritics) used to write a language, as well as the set of rules describing how to write these glyphs, including spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. ...

Other transcriptions

Chinese languages have been phonetically transcribed into many other writing systems over the centuries. The phagspa script, for example, has been very helpful in reconstructing the pronunciation of pre-modern forms of Chinese. The word “Mongol” written in Mongolian script. ...

Zhuyin 注音, (also known as bopomofo) is still widely used in Taiwan's elementary schools. A comparison table of Zhuyin to Pinyin exists in the Zhuyin article. Syllables based on Pinyin and Zhuyin can also be compared by looking at the following articles: Zhuyin fuhao (Traditional Chinese: ; Simplified Chinese: ; Hanyu Pinyin: ; Tongyong Pinyin: ; Wade-Giles: Chu-yin fu-hao), or Symbols for Annotating Sounds, often abbreviated as Zhuyin, or known as Bopomofo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) after the first four letters of this Chinese phonemic alphabet (bo po mo fo), is the national phonetic system of the... Zhuyin fuhao (Traditional Chinese: ; Simplified Chinese: ; Hanyu Pinyin: ; Tongyong Pinyin: ; Wade-Giles: Chu-yin fu-hao), or Symbols for Annotating Sounds, often abbreviated as Zhuyin, or known as Bopomofo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) after the first four letters of this Chinese phonemic alphabet (bo po mo fo), is the national phonetic system of the...

• Pinyin table
• Zhuyin table

There are also at least two systems of cyrillization for Chinese. The most widespread is the Palladius system. This pinyin table is a complete listing of all Hanyu Pinyin syllables used in Standard Mandarin. ... This zhuyin table is a complete listing of all Zhuyin/Bopomofo syllables used in Standard Mandarin. ... A Cyrillization is a system for representing a language with the Cyrillic alphabet, where the source language use a writing system other than the Cyrillic alphabet (compare this to Romanization). ... Cyrillization of Chinese from Pinyin It is known as the Palladiy system and is the official Cyrillization of Chinese language in Russia. ...

See also

• Romanization of Chinese in Taiwan