Literary and colloquial readings

Literary readings (文读; 文讀; wéndú) are usually used in loanwords, geographic and personal names, literary works such as poetry, and in formal contexts, while colloquial readings (白读; 白讀; báidú) are used in everyday vernacular speech.

For example, before the promotion of Standard Chinese (based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin), the Central Plains Mandarin of the Central Plain had few literary readings, but they now have literary readings that resemble the phonology of Modern Standard Chinese.

[7] On the other hand, the relatively influential Beijing and Guangzhou dialects have fewer literary readings than other varieties.

An analogous phenomenon exists to a much more significant degree in Japanese, where individual kanji generally have two common readings—the newer borrowed, more formal Sino-Japanese on'yomi, and the older native, more colloquial kun'yomi.

Middle Chinese tones in terms of level (平), rising (上), departing (去), and entering (入) are given.

For example, in the Yaoling dialect the colloquial reading of 物 'things' is [væʔ],[11] which is very similar to its pronunciation of Ba-Shu Chinese in the Song dynasty (960–1279).

[13] In the northern Wu-speaking region, the main sources of literary readings are the Beijing and Nanjing dialects during the Ming and Qing dynasties, and modern Standard Chinese.

[14] In the southern Wu-speaking region, literary readings tend to be adopted from the Hangzhou dialect.

Some pairs of literary and colloquial readings are interchangeable in all cases, such as in the words 吳淞 and 松江.

For example, the Hokkien word bah ('meat') is often written with the character 肉, which has etymologically unrelated colloquial and literary readings he̍k and jio̍k, respectively).

Phonologically, a large range of phonemes can differ between the character's two readings: in tone, final, initial, or any and all of these features.