Traditionally, Chinese people learned to pronounce characters in the dialect of Chinese that they grew up speaking.

To aid speakers of other dialects in their study of standard national language Putonghua or Mandarin, the Chinese government began to promote the use of a Romanization called Hanyu pinyin in 1958.

This pinyin system not only became the standard in mainland China but also gradually became the dominant system used outside of mainland China for representing spoken Mandarin.

Pinyin, literally "phonetic spelling," uses twenty-five (except "v") of the twenty-six letters of the Latin alphabet, plus tone marks and one other diacritic to represent the sound system of Mandarin.

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