Traditional Chinese characters

Traditional Chinese characters are one of two standardized character sets used to write the Chinese language, with the other being simplified characters. Traditional characters were predominant in written Chinese until the middle of the 20th century. Today, they are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, as well as in most overseas Chinese communities outside of Southeast Asia.

In the mid-20th century, People's Republic of China began standardizing simplified Chinese, mostly with characters that existed before as variants, sometimes merging previously distinct character forms. "Traditional" as such is a retronym applied to non-simplified character. As for non-Chinese languages using Chinese characters, Japanese kanji include many simplified characters known as standardized after World War II, sometimes distinct from their simplified Chinese counterparts. Korean hanja remain virtually identical to traditional Chinese characters. There has historically been a debate on traditional and simplified Chinese. Many Chinese-language systems and websites allow users to switch between the two character sets.

Terminology

Traditional characters are known by different names throughout the Chinese-speaking world. The most widely used name is . The government of Taiwan officially refers to them as . This term is sometimes used outside Taiwan to distinguish standard characters, including both simplified, and traditional, from other variants and idiomatic characters. Traditional characters are also known as , or to distinguish them from simplified characters.

Some argue that since traditional characters are often the original standard forms, they should not be called "complex". Conversely, there is a common objection to the description of traditional characters as "standard", due to their not being used by a large population of Chinese speakers. Additionally, as the process of Chinese character creation often made many characters more elaborate over time, there is sometimes a hesitation to characterize them as "traditional".

Use by region

The modern shapes of traditional Chinese characters first appeared with the emergence of the clerical script during the Han dynasty , with the sets of forms and norms more or less stable since the Southern and Northern dynasties period .

Mainland China

thumb|left|The [[Guangzhou Daily, one of China's best-read newspapers, uses traditional Chinese characters in its branding.]]

Although the majority of Chinese text in mainland China uses simplified Chinese characters, there is no legislation prohibiting the use of traditional Chinese characters, and they remain in wide use for stylistic and commercial purposes, particularly in calligraphy. The nameplates and logos of many major institutions are written in traditional characters, including those of the People's Daily, China Pictorial, the Bank of China, Air China, and Sinopec. Traditional characters are common in material and on buildings predating the promulgation of the current simplification scheme, as well as in media and publications imported from Hong Kong and Taiwan. A notable critic of character simplification was the renowned historian Chen Yinke, whose works were published in traditional characters with vertical typesetting in mainland China as he insisted until his copyright expired in 2020, fifty years after his death.

In mainland China, traditional Chinese characters are standardized according to the Table of Comparison between Standard, Traditional and Variant Chinese Characters. Dictionaries published in mainland China generally show both simplified and their traditional counterparts. There are small differences between the accepted traditional forms in mainland China and elsewhere, for example the accepted traditional form of in mainland China is (also the accepted form in Japan and Korea), while in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan the accepted form is (also the accepted form in Vietnamese chữ Nôm).

Hong Kong and Macau

In Hong Kong and Macau, traditional characters were retained during the colonial period, while the mainland adopted simplified characters. Simplified characters are contemporaneously used to accommodate immigrants and tourists, often from the mainland. The increasing use of simplified characters has led to concern among residents regarding protecting what they see as their local heritage.

Taiwan

Taiwan has never adopted simplified characters. The use of simplified characters in government documents and educational settings is discouraged by the government of Taiwan. Nevertheless, with sufficient context simplified characters are likely to be successfully read by those used to traditional characters, especially given some previous exposure. Many simplified characters were previously variants that had long been in some use, with systematic stroke simplifications used in folk handwriting since antiquity. In Taiwan, the set of traditional characters is regulated by the Ministry of Education and standardized in the Standard Form of National Characters.

Singapore

Traditional characters were recognized as the official script in Singapore until 1969, when the government officially adopted Simplified characters. Traditional characters still are widely used in contexts such as in baby and corporation names, advertisements, decorations, official documents and in newspapers.

Use on computers

Encoding

In the past, traditional Chinese was most often encoded on computers using the Big5 standard, which favored traditional characters. However, the ubiquitous Unicode standard gives equal weight to simplified and traditional Chinese characters, and has become by far the most popular encoding for Chinese-language text.

Input methods

There are various input method editors (IMEs) available for the input of Chinese characters. Many characters, often dialectical variants, are encoded in Unicode but cannot be inputted using certain IMEs, with one example being the Shanghainese-language character —a composition of with the radical—used instead of the Standard Chinese .

Typefaces

Typefaces often use the initialism to signify the use of traditional Chinese characters, as well as for simplified Chinese characters. In addition, the Noto family of typefaces, for example, also provides separate fonts for the traditional character set used in Taiwan () and the set used in Hong Kong ().

Webpages

Most Chinese-language webpages now use Unicode for their text. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) recommends the use of the language tag to specify webpage content written with traditional characters.

ISO 15924 offers to mark text in traditional Chinese and for text mixing traditional Chinese and Latin characters, sometimes used for Taiwanese Hokkien.

Comparison with other scripts

In the Japanese writing system, are traditional forms, which were simplified to create for standardized Japanese use following World War II. Kyūjitai are mostly congruent with the traditional characters in Chinese, save for minor stylistic variation. Characters that are not included in the list are generally recommended to be printed in their traditional forms, with a few exceptions. Additionally, there are , which are kanji wholly created in Japan, rather than originally being borrowed from China.

In the Korean writing system, hanja—replaced almost entirely by hangul in South Korea and totally replaced in North Korea—are mostly identical with their traditional counterparts, save minor stylistic variations. As with Japanese, there are autochthonous hanja, known as .

Traditional Chinese characters are also used by non-Chinese ethnic groups. The Maniq people living in Thailand and Malaysia use Chinese characters to write the Kensiu language.