Google Doodle Honors Pinyin Creator Zhou Youguang

By Bridget O'Donnell

A year after he passed away at the age of 111, Zhou Youguang was honored with a Google Doodle over the weekend.

Zhou, the Chinese linguist "father of Pinyin," spent three years creating the Pinyin system together with the Communist party starting in 1955. The system revolutionized language instruction in China and was key in raising rates literacy across the country, from only about 20 percent in the mid-20th century to more than 90 percent today.

These days, Pinyin is the foundation for language instruction in schools across China and is also used for character input on smartphones, computers and other electornic devices.      

Zhou passed away in Beijing on January 14, 2017, just a day after his 111th birthday.

On January 13, 2018 — what would have been Zhou's 112th birthday — the US tech giant celebrated his legacy with a Google Doodle from illustrator Cynthia Yuan Cheng on the search engine's homepage. The animation features two cards switching between the Chinese characters and Pinyin for 'Google' (谷歌, guge).

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