section_path: Writing system
section_name: Writing system
paragraph_text: Writing system
  
  The Chinese orthography centers on Chinese characters, which are written within imaginary square blocks, traditionally arranged in vertical columns, read from top to bottom down a column, and right to left across columns, despite alternative arrangement with rows of characters from left to right within a row and from top to bottom across rows (like English and other Western writing systems) having become more popular since the 20th century. Chinese characters denote morphemes independent of phonetic variation in different languages. Thus the character 一 (' one ') is pronounced as yī in Standard Chinese, yat1 in Cantonese and it in Hokkien, a form of Min.
  
  Most modern written Chinese is in the form of written vernacular Chinese, based on spoken Standard Chinese, regardless of dialectical background. Written vernacular Chinese largely replaced Literary Chinese in the early 20th century as the country's standard written language. However, vocabularies from different Chinese-speaking areas have diverged, and the divergence can be observed in written Chinese.
  
  Due to the divergence of variants, some unique morphemes are not found in Standard Chinese. Characters rarely used in Standard Chinese have also been created or inherited from archaic literary standards to represent these unique morphemes. For example, characters like 冇 and 係 are actively used in Cantonese and Hakka, while being archaic or unused in standard written Chinese. The most prominent example of a non-Standard Chinese orthography is Written Cantonese, which is used in tabloids and on the internet among Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong and elsewhere.
  
  Chinese had no uniform system of phonetic transcription until the mid-20th century, although enunciation patterns were recorded in early rime books and dictionaries. Early Indian translators, working in Sanskrit and Pali, were the first to attempt to describe the sounds and enunciation patterns of Chinese in a foreign language. After the 15th century, the efforts of Jesuits and Western court missionaries resulted in some Latin character transcription/writing systems, based on various variants of Chinese languages. Some of these Latin character-based systems are still being used to write various Chinese variants in the modern era.
  
  In Hunan, women in certain areas write their local Chinese language variant in Nüshu, a syllabary derived from Chinese characters. The Dungan language, considered by many a dialect of Mandarin, is nowadays written in Cyrillic and was previously written in the Arabic script. The Dungan people are primarily Muslim and live mainly in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia; many Hui people, living mainly in China, also speak the language.