Zhou Youguang (13 January 1906 – 14 January 2017) was a Chinese linguist and sinologist who is known as the “father of Pinyin,” the official romanization system for Standard Chinese. He developed the system in the 1950s and it was later adopted by the government as the official method for transcribing Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet. It was officially adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in 1982