Traditional Chinese characters

Traditional characters are known by different names throughout the Chinese-speaking world. The government of Taiwan officially refers to traditional Chinese characters as . This term is also used outside Taiwan to distinguish standard characters, including both simplified, and traditional, from other variants and idiomatic characters. Users of traditional characters elsewhere, as well as those using simplified characters, call traditional characters , , 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". Some people refer to traditional characters as "proper characters" ( or ) and to simplified characters as or , as the words for simplified and reduced are homophonous in Standard Chinese, both pronounced as . == 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 '', an official Communist Party newspaper, uses traditional Chinese characters in its branding. Although the majority of Chinese text in mainland China are simplified characters, there is no legislation prohibiting the use of traditional Chinese characters, and often traditional Chinese characters remain in use for stylistic and commercial purposes, such as in shopfront displays and advertising. Traditional Chinese characters remain ubiquitous on buildings that predate the promulgation of the current simplification scheme, such as former government buildings, religious buildings, educational institutions, and historical monuments. Traditional Chinese characters continue to be used for ceremonial, cultural, scholarly/academic research, and artistic/decorative purposes. Dictionaries published in mainland China generally show both simplified and their traditional counterparts. There are 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). The PRC tends to print material intended for people in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, and overseas Chinese in traditional characters. For example, versions of the ''People's Daily are printed in traditional characters, and both People's Daily and Xinhua'' have traditional character versions of their website available, using Big5 encoding. Mainland companies selling products in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan use traditional characters in order to communicate with consumers; the inverse is equally true as well. In digital media, many cultural phenomena imported from Hong Kong and Taiwan into mainland China, such as music videos, karaoke videos, subtitled movies, and subtitled dramas, use traditional Chinese characters. 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. 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. == See also ==