Bopomofo (Zhuyin Symbols)

Bopomofo, officially Zhuyin Fuhao (注音符號, 'phonetic notation symbols'), is the phonetic alphabet used in Taiwan to write the sounds of Mandarin. It is not a replacement for Chinese characters: it stands beside them, telling you how a character is pronounced, the way pinyin does elsewhere. Its everyday name comes from its first four letters, ㄅ ㄆ ㄇ ㄈ (b, p, m, f), just as 'alphabet' comes from alpha and beta, and in Taiwan the whole system is simply called ㄅㄆㄇㄈ.

The standard set has 37 symbols, recited in a fixed order that every chart, dictionary and keyboard follows. First the 21 initials, grouped by where the sound is made: ㄅ ㄆ ㄇ ㄈ (b p m f), ㄉ ㄊ ㄋ ㄌ (d t n l), ㄍ ㄎ ㄏ (g k h), ㄐ ㄑ ㄒ (j q x), ㄓ ㄔ ㄕ ㄖ (zh ch sh r) and ㄗ ㄘ ㄙ (z c s). Then the three medials ㄧ ㄨ ㄩ (i, u, ü), and finally the 13 finals: the single vowels ㄚ ㄛ ㄜ ㄝ (a o e ê), the diphthongs ㄞ ㄟ ㄠ ㄡ (ai ei ao ou), the nasal endings ㄢ ㄣ ㄤ ㄥ (an en ang eng) and ㄦ (er). The grid on this page keeps that order.

A syllable is spelled with at most three symbols, initial, medial and final, plus a tone mark: 媽 mā is ㄇㄚ, 光 guāng is ㄍㄨㄤ, 學 xué is ㄒㄩㄝˊ. A symbol can stand alone as a whole syllable too: ㄧ is yi, ㄨ is wu, ㄚ is a. The seven initials ㄓ ㄔ ㄕ ㄖ ㄗ ㄘ ㄙ have no written vowel when they form a syllable on their own: 知 zhī is just ㄓ, 四 sì is ㄙˋ. That hidden vowel has a letter of its own, ㄭ, which linguists use when they need to show it and which ordinary writing leaves out.

Tone marks ˊ ˇ ˋ ˙ and how Zhuyin is written

Mandarin has four tones and a neutral tone, and Zhuyin marks them with small strokes borrowed from the shape of the pitch itself. The first, high level tone is normally left unmarked, though a bar ˉ can be written in careful work. The second, rising tone is ˊ, the third, dipping tone is ˇ, the fourth, falling tone is ˋ, and the light neutral tone is a dot ˙. So 媽 麻 馬 罵 (mā má mǎ mà) are ㄇㄚ, ㄇㄚˊ, ㄇㄚˇ and ㄇㄚˋ, and the 嗎 that ends a question is ˙ㄇㄚ. The four tone marks are the same characters Unicode uses for other purposes (the caron and the modifier acute, grave and macron), which is why they have no Bopomofo names of their own; they sit here because no Zhuyin syllable is complete without them.

Position matters. In horizontal text the tone mark goes to the upper right of the syllable's last symbol, and the neutral-tone dot goes before the syllable, ˙ㄇㄚ. In vertical text, which is how Zhuyin appears in Taiwanese children's books, the symbols run top to bottom in a narrow column to the right of each Chinese character, the tone mark sits beside the column, and the neutral dot goes on top. A rhotic ending ㄦ, as in 花兒 huār ㄏㄨㄚㄦ, takes the tone mark on the symbol before it, not on ㄦ.

Taiwan's Ministry of Education also publishes Taiwanese Phonetic Symbols (方音符號), an extension of Zhuyin for Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka designed in 1946. Hokkien has more tones than Mandarin and needs extra marks, ˪ and ˫ among them, and dotted stop letters for its checked tones; those marks are beyond this page, but the extra letters that system adds are the Bopomofo Extended group at the end of the chart.

Where Bopomofo comes from: 1913, Zhang Binglin and the old characters inside the letters

Zhuyin was created by the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation, which the Ministry of Education of the new Chinese Republic convened in Beijing in 1913 to fix a national standard pronunciation. The commission adopted a set of phonetic signs based on a shorthand devised by the scholar Zhang Binglin, in which each sign is a simplified or archaic form of an old Chinese character that had the right sound. The Ministry promulgated the set in 1918 as Zhuyin Zimu, 'phonetic letters'; it was renamed Zhuyin Fuhao, 'phonetic symbols', in 1930 so that nobody would mistake it for an alphabet meant to replace characters.

The ancestry is still visible. ㄅ is 勹, the top of 包 bāo; ㄆ is 攵, a form of 攴 pū; ㄇ is the 'cover' 冂; ㄈ is the box radical 匚 fāng; ㄉ is an archaic 刀 dāo; ㄋ is 乃 nǎi; ㄌ is an archaic 力 lì; ㄚ is 丫 yā, a fork; ㄧ is 一 yī, the number one; and ㄦ is the bottom half of 兒 ér. Reading a Zhuyin chart is, in a small way, reading the oldest layer of Chinese writing.

Three of the original letters wrote sounds that the 1913 standard, a compromise between northern and southern speech, still had: ㄪ (v), ㄫ (ng as an initial) and ㄬ (gn, a palatal n). When the standard was reset to Beijing pronunciation on 7 May 1932, those sounds went with it, and the three letters were kept only for writing dialects. They remain in the Unicode block alongside the 37 and are listed here in their own group. Two more letters joined the block recently: ㄮ, an early form of the letter e that appears in old materials (Unicode 10.0, 2017), and ㄯ, a syllabic nasal for Taiwanese Hokkien (Unicode 11.0, 2018).

Bopomofo vs pinyin: who uses Zhuyin today

After 1949 the two sides of the Taiwan Strait went different ways. The People's Republic adopted Hanyu Pinyin, a romanisation with Latin letters, in 1958, and Zhuyin faded from mainland classrooms, though the Xinhua Zidian dictionary still prints it next to pinyin. Taiwan kept Zhuyin, and it is the first thing a Taiwanese child learns at school: the opening weeks of first grade are spent on ㄅㄆㄇㄈ, and for the next years every textbook, storybook and the children's newspaper Mandarin Daily News (國語日報) print a column of Zhuyin beside every character. Adults never stop using it, because it is also how most people in Taiwan type.

Zhuyin and pinyin write the same sounds, so a chart that pairs them converts one to the other: ㄅ b, ㄆ p, ㄇ m, ㄈ f, ㄉ d, ㄊ t, ㄋ n, ㄌ l, ㄍ g, ㄎ k, ㄏ h, ㄐ j, ㄑ q, ㄒ x, ㄓ zh, ㄔ ch, ㄕ sh, ㄖ r, ㄗ z, ㄘ c, ㄙ s, ㄧ i or y, ㄨ u or w, ㄩ ü or yu, ㄚ a, ㄛ o, ㄜ e, ㄝ ê, ㄞ ai, ㄟ ei, ㄠ ao, ㄡ ou, ㄢ an, ㄣ en, ㄤ ang, ㄥ eng, ㄦ er. Learners often find Zhuyin the more honest of the two, because each symbol has exactly one sound, whereas pinyin spells the vowel of 你 nǐ and the vowel of 四 sì with the same letter i. For the characters themselves see Chinese Characters and Traditional Chinese Characters; for Taiwan's flag and symbols, Taiwan Emoji & Symbols.

Zhuyin also serves the island's other languages. The Bopomofo Extended block, added to Unicode in 1999, holds the letters of the Taiwanese Phonetic Symbols for Taiwanese Hokkien and Hakka: voiced initials ㆠ (b), ㆡ (dz), ㆢ (dzh) and ㆣ (g), the vowels ㆤ (e), ㆦ (open o) and ㆨ (the Hakka central vowel), nasal vowels ㆥ ㆧ ㆩ ㆪ ㆫ ㆮ ㆯ, the syllabic nasals ㆬ (m) and ㆭ (ng), the endings ㆰ ㆱ ㆲ, and the small stop letters ㆴ ㆵ ㆶ ㆻ ㆷ for the clipped -p, -t, -k and glottal endings that Mandarin lost centuries ago (ㆻ, added in 2020, is now the preferred form for the -k ending). Three further letters, ㆸ ㆹ ㆺ (2010), were encoded for the Hmu and Ge languages of Guizhou, and four, ㆼ (gw), ㆽ (kw), ㆾ (oe) and ㆿ (ah), for a 1930s to 1950s Cantonese adaptation (2020). The Taiwanese Hokkien Characters and Hakka Characters pages cover the characters those languages are written with.

How to type Bopomofo, the ㄅㄅ ㄏㄏ chat slang, and fonts

Every Windows, macOS, iPhone and Android device has a Zhuyin keyboard; add 'Chinese (Traditional) – Zhuyin' or 'Phonetic' in the language settings. The layout used in Taiwan is the Dachen (大千) or 'standard' layout, which lays the chart over a QWERTY keyboard column by column, top to bottom: the 1 Q A Z keys are ㄅ ㄆ ㄇ ㄈ, the 2 W S X keys are ㄉ ㄊ ㄋ ㄌ, E D C are ㄍ ㄎ ㄏ, R F V are ㄐ ㄑ ㄒ, 5 T G B are ㄓ ㄔ ㄕ ㄖ, Y H N are ㄗ ㄘ ㄙ, U J M are ㄧ ㄨ ㄩ, and the finals run along the right-hand side (8 ㄚ, I ㄛ, K ㄜ, , ㄝ, 9 ㄞ, O ㄟ, L ㄠ, . ㄡ, 0 ㄢ, P ㄣ, ; ㄤ, / ㄥ, - ㄦ). The tone keys are 6 for ˊ, 3 for ˇ, 4 for ˋ, 7 for ˙, and the space bar for the first tone; pressing a tone key ends the syllable and offers the matching characters. Keyboards sold in Taiwan have the symbols printed on the keys. On phones the same layout appears as a Zhuyin keypad, and iPhone and Android also offer a sliding or 10-key Zhuyin keyboard.

Because every keystroke on a Zhuyin keyboard shows a Zhuyin symbol until you choose a character, Taiwanese internet users started leaving the symbols in, and 注音文 ('Zhuyin text') was born on BBS boards and in chat rooms in the 1990s. The classics: ㄅㄅ is 掰掰 bye-bye; ㄏㄏ is 呵呵, a chuckle that often reads as dry or sarcastic; ㄎㄎ is a snicker; ㄉ stands for 的 or 得, so 我ㄉ is 'mine'; ㄋ is 你 'you' or the particle 呢; ㄇ is the question particle 嗎; ㄟ is 欸 'hey'; ㄛ is 哦 'oh'. One form is not slang but necessity: ㄍㄧㄥ (gīng, to hold back or keep a straight face) is a Taiwanese Hokkien word with no agreed character, so even newspapers write it in Zhuyin. Use these only with friends; teachers and employers in Taiwan have been complaining about 注音文 for twenty years, and schools penalise it in essays.

Font support is good for the main block and patchy for the rest. The 37 symbols, the tone marks and ㄪ ㄫ ㄬ have been in Unicode since version 1.1 and are in every system font with Chinese coverage: Microsoft JhengHei on Windows, PingFang and Heiti on Apple devices, Noto Sans CJK on Android and Linux. Zhuyin in Taiwanese fonts is normally drawn to sit in a narrow vertical column, so a syllable like ㄒㄩㄝˊ may look slightly stretched in a Western font. ㄭ (Unicode 5.1, 2008) and the Bopomofo Extended letters from 1999 display on most current devices with Noto Sans CJK or a Taiwanese font; the newest additions, ㄮ ㄯ and the 2020 letters ㆻ ㆼ ㆽ ㆾ ㆿ, often appear as empty boxes unless a very recent font such as the latest Noto Sans CJK is installed. The characters still copy and paste correctly: what the reader sees is a font question, not a text question.