In as far as the varieties of Chinese often referred to as “dialects” are written, two different systems are used: Chinese characters or an alphabetic system (Klöter 2005). This article only discusses the use of characters to write non-standard varieties of Chinese.

Every major Chinese dialect has a number of morphemes that for one reason or another (see below) cannot be written in a straightforward way using standard characters, and are therefore written with what we call “dialect characters” (fāngyánzì 方言字). In a narrow sense, dialect characters are Chinese characters th…