In 1999, however, the Legislative Yuan endorsed a slightly modified version of Hanyu Pinyin, creating parallel romanization schemes along largely partisan lines, with Kuomintang-supporting areas using Hanyu Pinyin, and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) areas using Tongyong Pinyin. In 2002, the Taiwanese government led by the DPP promulgated the use of Tongyong Pinyin as the country's preferred system, but this was formally abandoned in 2009 in favor of Hanyu Pinyin. In addition, various other historical romanization systems also exist across the island, with multiple systems sometimes existing in the same locality. Following the defeat of the Kuomintang in the Chinese Civil War and their subsequent retreat to Taiwan in 1945, little emphasis was placed on the romanization of Chinese characters, with the Wade-Giles system used as the default. It is still widely used for transcribing people's legal names today. The Gwoyeu Romatzyh method, invented in 1928, also was in use in Taiwan during this time period, albeit to a lesser extent. In 1984, Taiwan's Ministry of Education began revising the Gwoyeu Romatzyh method out of concern that Hanyu Pinyin was gaining prominence internationally. Ultimately, a revised version of Gwoyeu Romatzyh was released in 1986, which was called Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II. However, this system was not widely adopted. Phonology Standard Guoyu Like Putonghua, both Standard and Taiwan Guoyu are tonal. Pronunciation of many individual characters differs in the standards prescribed by language authorities in Taipei and Beijing. Mainland authorities tended to adopt pronunciations popular in Northern Mandarin areas, whereas Taiwanese authorities prefer traditional pronunciations recorded in dictionaries from the 1930s and 1940s. Some examples of differences are given later in this section. These character-level differences notwithstanding, Standard Guoyu pronunciation is largely identical to Putonghua, but with two major systematic differences (also true of Taiwan Guoyu): Erhua, the rhotacization of certain morphemes with the suffix - -er, is very rare in Guoyu (and very common in Beijing Putonghua). The "neutral tone" ( qīngshēng) does not occur as often, so final syllables generally retain their tone (e.g., dànshì, xiānshēng). This tendency to retain original tone is not present in words ending noun suffixes such as - -zi or - -tou ; Guoyu speakers would not pronounce as *háizǐ. In addition, two other phenomena, while nonstandard, are extremely common across all Mandarin speakers in Taiwan, even the highly educated: The retroflex sounds zh- , ch- , and sh- merge into the alveolar consonants (z-