The system was designed by Professor Chu Chao-hsiang, a member of the National Languages Committee in Taiwan, in 1946.

It is one of the phonetic notation systems officially promoted by Taiwan's Ministry of Education.

The Mandarin Phonetic Symbols were added to the Unicode Standard in October 1991 with the release of version 1.0.

The extended phonetic symbols were added to the Unicode Standard in September 1999 with the release of version 3.0.

[6][7] The Academia Sinica of Taiwan has released three sets of fonts for Taiwanese Hokkien: "吳守禮標楷台語注音字型", "吳守禮細明台語注音字型", and "吳守禮台語注音字型".