Mandarin Chinese
Mandarin is the largest branch of the Sinitic languages. Mandarin varieties are natively spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers, spread over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast. Its spread is generally attributed to the overall greater ease of travel in the North China Plain compared to the more mountainous south, combined with the relatively recent spread of northern varieties to frontier areas.
Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the Beijing dialect. Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers. Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin varieties are found north of the Yangtze River, the group is sometimes referred to as Northern Chinese.
Most Mandarin varieties have four tones. The final stops of Middle Chinese have disappeared in most of these varieties, but some have merged them as a final glottal stop. Many Mandarin varieties, including that of Beijing, retain retroflex initial consonants, which have been lost in southern Chinese varieties.
The historical capitals of China have been within the Mandarin-speaking area for most of the last two millennia, making these dialects very prestigious. Some form of Mandarin has served as a lingua franca for government officials and the courts since at least the 14th century. In the early 20th century, a standard language based on the Beijing dialect, with elements from other Mandarin varieties, was adopted as the national language. Today, Standard Chinese is the official language of China and Taiwan, one of four official languages of Singapore, and one of six official languages of the United Nations. Recent increased migration from Mandarin-speaking regions of China and Taiwan has resulted in the language being one of the more frequently used varieties of Chinese among Chinese diaspora communities. It is also the most commonly taught form of Chinese as a foreign language.
Name
The English word "mandarin" originally meant an official of the Ming and Qing empires.Since their native varieties were often mutually unintelligible, these officials communicated using a koiné language based on various northern varieties. When Jesuit missionaries learned this standard language in the 16th century, they called it "Mandarin", from its Chinese name.
In everyday English, "Mandarin" refers to Standard Chinese, which is often called simply "Chinese". Standard Mandarin Chinese is based on Beijing dialect, with some lexical and syntactic influence from other Mandarin dialects. It is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, as well as one of the four official languages of Singapore, and a high-prestige minority language in Malaysia. It also functions as the language of instruction in mainland China and Taiwan. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, under the name "Chinese". Chinese speakers refer to the modern standard language as in mainland China, in Taiwan, and in Malaysia and Singapore, but not as.
Linguists use the term "Mandarin" to refer to the diverse group of dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China, which Chinese linguists call. The alternative term, is used less and less among Chinese linguists. By extension, the term "Old Mandarin" or "Early Mandarin" is used by linguists to refer to the northern dialects recorded in materials from the Yuan dynasty.
Native speakers who are not academic linguists may not recognize that the variants they speak are classified in linguistics as members of "Mandarin" in a broader sense. Within Chinese social or cultural discourse, there is not a "Mandarin" identity based on language; rather, there are strong regional identities centred on individual dialects because of the wide geographical distribution and cultural diversity of their speakers. Speakers of forms of Mandarin other than the standard typically refer to the variety they speak by a geographic name—for example the Sichuan dialect and the Hebei dialect or Northeastern dialect, all being regarded as distinct from the standard language, with which they may not share much mutual intelligibility.
History
The hundreds of modern local varieties of Chinese developed from regional variants of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese. Traditionally, seven major groups of dialects have been recognized. Aside from Mandarin, the other six are Wu, Gan, and Xiang in central China and Min, Hakka, and Yue on the southeast coast. The Language Atlas of China distinguishes three further groups: Jin, Huizhou in the Huizhou region of Anhui and Zhejiang, and Pinghua in Guangxi and Yunnan.Old Mandarin
After the fall of the Northern Song and during the reign of the Jin and Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common form of speech developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital, a language referred to as Old Mandarin. New genres of vernacular literature were based on this language, including verse, drama and story forms, such as the qu and sanqu poetry.The rhyming conventions of the new verse were codified in a rime dictionary called the Zhongyuan Yinyun. A radical departure from the rime table tradition that had evolved over the previous centuries, this dictionary contains a wealth of information on the phonology of Old Mandarin. Further sources are the 'Phags-pa script based on the Tibetan alphabet, which was used to write several of the languages of the Mongol empire, including Chinese and the Menggu Ziyun, a rime dictionary based on 'Phags-pa. The rime books differ in some details, but overall show many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects, such as the reduction and disappearance of final plosives and the reorganization of the Middle Chinese tones.
In Middle Chinese, initial stops and affricates showed a three-way contrast between tenuis, voiceless aspirated and voiced consonants. There were four tones, with the fourth or "entering tone", a checked tone comprising syllables ending in plosives. Syllables with voiced initials tended to be pronounced with a lower pitch and by the late Tang dynasty, each of the tones had split into two registers conditioned by the initials. When voicing was lost in all languages except the Wu subfamily, this distinction became phonemic and the system of initials and tones was rearranged differently in each of the major groups.
The Zhongyuan Yinyun shows the typical Mandarin four-tone system resulting from a split of the "even" tone and loss of the entering tone, with its syllables distributed across the other tones. Similarly, voiced plosives and affricates have become voiceless aspirates in the "even" tone and voiceless non-aspirates in others, another distinctive Mandarin development. However, the language still retained a final -m, which has merged with -n in modern dialects and initial voiced fricatives. It also retained the distinction between velars and alveolar sibilants in palatal environments, which later merged in most Mandarin dialects to yield a palatal series.
The flourishing vernacular literature of the period also shows distinctively Mandarin vocabulary and syntax, though some, such as the third-person pronoun, can be traced back to the Tang dynasty.
Vernacular literature
Until the early 20th century, formal writing and even much poetry and fiction was done in Literary Chinese, which was modeled on the classics of the Warring States period and the Han dynasty. Over time, the various spoken varieties diverged greatly from Literary Chinese, which was learned and composed as a special language. Preserved from the sound changes that affected the various spoken varieties, its economy of expression was greatly valued. For example, is unambiguous in written Chinese, but has over 75 homophones in Standard Chinese.The literary language was less appropriate for documents that were meant to be performed or recited, such as plays or stories. From at least the Yuan dynasty plays that recounted the subversive tales of China's Robin Hoods to the Ming dynasty novels such as Water Margin, on down to the Qing dynasty novel Dream of the Red Chamber and beyond, there developed a literature in written vernacular Chinese. In many cases, this written language reflected Mandarin varieties and since pronunciation differences were not conveyed in this written form, this tradition had a unifying force across all the Mandarin-speaking regions and beyond.
Hu Shih, a pivotal figure of the first half of the twentieth century, wrote an influential and perceptive study of this literary tradition, entitled.
Late imperial koiné
Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people living in many parts of South China spoke only their local variety. As a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties, known as Guānhuà. Knowledge of this language was thus essential for an official career, but it was never formally defined.Officials varied widely in their pronunciation; in 1728, the Yongzheng Emperor, unable to understand the accents of officials from Guangdong and Fujian, issued a decree requiring the governors of those provinces to provide for the teaching of proper pronunciation. Although the resulting Academies for Correct Pronunciation were short-lived, the decree did spawn a number of textbooks that give some insight into the ideal pronunciation. Common features included:
- loss of the Middle Chinese voiced initials except for v-
- merger of -m finals with -n
- the characteristic Mandarin four-tone system in open syllables, but retaining a final glottal stop in "entering tone" syllables
- retention of the distinction between palatalized velars and dental affricates, the source of the spellings "Peking" and "Tientsin" for modern "Beijing" and "Tianjin".