Traditional Chinese character
Traditional Chinese characters are one of two standard character sets of printed contemporary Chinese written language. The other form is simplified Chinese characters, created by the government of the People's Republic of China. Traditional Chinese is text written with Traditional Chinese characters. Traditional Chinese characters are used in Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, and most overseas Chinese communities. In contrast, simplified characters are used in Mainland China and Singapore.
Controversy over name
Among Chinese people, traditional Chinese characters are called by several different names, each with different implications. The government of the Republic of China officially calls traditional Chinese characters standard characters (Traditional Chinese: 正體字; Simplified Chinese: 正体字; pinyin: zhèngtǐzì), which implies that traditional characters are the full and correct forms of the characters. In contrast, users of simplified characters call them complex characters (繁體字 fántǐzì), or, informally, old characters (老字 lǎo zì), with the implication that traditional Chinese characters have been replaced and are now obsolete.
Traditional character users argue that traditional characters cannot be called "complex" as they were never made more complex; the characters were preserved the way they were. Conversely supporters of simplified Chinese characters object strongly to the description of these characters as "standard", since they view the new simplified characters as the contemporary standard.
Printed text
When printing text, people in Mainland China and Singapore mainly use the simplified system, which was developed by the People's Republic of China government in the 1950s. However, the PRC also prints material intended to be read outside of Mainland China using traditional characters. In handwritten text, most Chinese use informal individual simplifications, and there are some characters in which an informal simplified form is more common even in traditional Chinese text, notably the Tai in Taiwan.
Computer character encoding
In the past, Traditional Chinese was most often rendered using the Big5 character encoding scheme, a character encoding scheme that favors Traditional Chinese. Unicode, however, has become increasingly popular as a way to render Traditional Chinese. Unicode gives equal weight to both simplified and traditional Chinese characters and does not favor either over the other.
Usage in other languages
Traditional characters are also used in Korean Hanja, and moderately simplified traditional characters are used in Japanese Kanji.
See also
id:Hanzi tradisional ja:繁体字 zh-cn:繁体中文