Fonts supporting the Chinese Script
Chinese characters are used to write Chinese languages, including Mandarin (Standard Chinese), Cantonese, Hakka, Sichuanese, Taiwanese and Wenzhounese. They are also used for writing Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese. As a logographic script, each character originally represented one grammatical unit of meaning. While many characters representing basic concepts developed as pictographs, others modified these basic characters to form new ones with similar pronunciations or meanings. Over 85% of characters are semanto-phonetic, meaning they combine elements indicating pronunciation values and semantic ideas. Classical Chinese literary culture spread to Japan, Korea and Vietnam, and with it, so did Chinese characters. Linguistic reforms in 20th-century China and Japan introduced simplified character variants for many Chinese characters. Simplified Chinese characters are used in China, Singapore and Malaysia, while traditional Chinese characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Simplified Japanese variants are used in Japan. In Japanese and Korean, characters are used in tandem with native syllabaries. Different linguistic traditions employ different conventions for writing characters, with variation in appearance, stroke order and stylisation.