Tongyong Pinyin
romanization system for Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan
Tongyong Pinyin was the official romanization of Mandarin in Taiwan between 2002 and 2008. The system was unofficially used between 2000 and 2002, while a new romanization system for Taiwan was being evaluated for adoption. Taiwan's Ministry of Education approved the system in 2002, but its use was optional.
From 1 January 2009, the Ministry of Education began promoting Hanyu Pinyin. Local governments were not able to get financial aid from the central government if they used Tongyong Pinyin-derived romanizations. However, Tongyong Pinyin has continued in use for the transliteration of some place names and personal names in Taiwan (Republic of China). Some of the romanized names of the districts, subway stations and streets in Kaohsiung, Tainan, Taichung, Yunlin County and other places are derived from Tongyong Pinyin – for example, Cijin District (旗津區, Cíjin Cyu).
History
The impetus for the invention of Tongyong Pinyin was the need for a standardized romanization system. For decades, the island had employed varying systems, usually simplifications or adaptations of Wade–Giles.
Zhuyin, a standard phonetic system for language education in Taiwan's schools, does not use the Latin alphabet.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tongyong Pinyin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.