Is there an alphabetic system in the Chinese language?

Question

Just wanted to confirm, is there an alphabetic system in the Chinese language? Like in the Korean language, the Hangul is in alphabetic system.

Also does the official Chinese Language adopts word spacing? Or is it more like, certain countries that has Chinese as an official Language does adopt word spacing and others don't?

Answer 1

• The official way to write Chinese uses Chinese characters, which is not an alphabetical system.

• There have been various phonetic systems developed to either write or transcribe Chinese. Some of these systems are alphabets. To emphasise, these phonetic systems are not official ways of writing Chinese.

• The official way of writing, using characters, does not use word spacing. When using a phonetic script, word spacing is commonly adopted; see Spacing Guidelines for Modern Chinese Writing.

Example phonetic systems:

Writing Chinese

• Pe̍h-ōe-jī, a Roman alphabet for Minnan;
• Dungan Cyrillic, a Cyrillic alphabet for a the Dungan language, a dialect of Central Plains Mandarin;
• Xiao'erjing, a Perso-Arabic-based abugida for Mandarin.

Transcribing Chinese

• Hanyu Pinyin, a Roman alphabet for Mandarin;

• Yale Romanisation for Cantonese;

• Bopomofo, a semi-syllabary for Mandarin.