Mandarin
Mandarin is the standard dialect of spoken Chinese. It is referred to as Pǔtōnghuà in China, Guóyǔ in Taiwan, and Huáyǔ in Singapore. In its modern form, Mandarin is based on the dialect of Beijing. Localisms, such as the final r sound favored by Beijing residents, are not part of the standard form.
| Mandarin | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional Chinese | 普通話 | ||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 普通话 | ||||||||
| Literal meaning | common speech | ||||||||
| |||||||||
In imperial times, people in different parts of the empire communicated with each other using written Classical Chinese. By the Tang dynasty (618–907), spoken and written Chinese had diverged into separate languages.
At the end of the Tang, China was divided into northern and southern states. The Mongols conquered China in the thirteenth century. They treated North and South China as two units within their larger empire. For example, Marco Polo writes of "Cathay" (North China) and "Manzi" (South China). But he did not any expression that corresponds to the modern concept of "China." By the time China was reunited by the Ming dynasty in 1368, North and South had drifted far apart.
The first Ming emperor selected the Lower Yangtse dialect of Nanjing as a lingua franca. This dialect was referred to as Guānhuà ("officials' speech"). The word "Mandarin," first recorded in Portuguese, refers to a Chinese official. Classical Chinese continued to be used for formal writing, although popular works such as the novel The Golden Lotus (1610) were written in the Nanjing dialect. In the late nineteenth century, the dialect of Beijing displaced that of Nanjing. Although both cities speak dialects of the North Chinese language type, there is considerable divergence. In the 1920s, Classical Chinese was displaced by a writing system based on Beijing dialect.
In the twentieth century, both the Nationalists and the Communists promoted the use of Mandarin in popular speech. This has occasionally been resisted by speakers of other dialects. The popularity Hong Kong-based pop culture has allowed the Cantonese-speaking South to resist the advance of Mandarin.
References
- Coblin, W. South, "A brief history of Mandarin", Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 120, issue 4, pp. 537–552.