Initials and Finals

In the history of Chinese language there was a lot of transcription systems established in order to pronounce Chinese. Nowadays, there is the official alphabetical transcription called Pinyin (拼音 pīnyīn). Adopted in China in late the year of 1950, the Pinyin is now commonly used in the international community.

The basic phonological unity in Chinese is a syllable. A Chinese syllable has a fixed structure.

In Standard Chinese (called also “Mandarin” or “Common Speech = 普通话 pǔtōnghuà”) a syllable is made up of a maximum of 4 elements.

Chinese syllables can be analyzed into 3 parts; Initial (声母 shēngmǔ), Final (韵母yùnmǔ) and Tone (声调shēngdiào). Beginning with an initial, the rest is the final and the whole syllable pitch a tone.

For example, in the syllable “bīng”, “b” is the initial and “ing” is the final. Sometimes, a syllable stands without an initial, like “yě” for example. But all syllables must have a final.

In Modern Chinese there are 21 initial and 38 final.

Here is a table of combinations of Initials and Finals in Putonghua: