Qiongwen

Qiongwen or Hainanese is a branch of the Min Nan group of spoken in the southern island province of Hainan. "Hainanese" can sometimes mean the language of the Li people living in the southern coast of Hainan, but generally means the Qiongwen language of the Han Chinese in Hainan. It is mutually unintelligible with other Min Nan dialects, such as , , and Taiwanese.

Puxian Min

Puxian is a subcategory of Min Chinese.

It is spoken mostly in Fujian province, in Putian, parts of Fuzhou, and parts of Quanzhou. Puxian is a word conbine two place names of Putian City and Xianyou County . More than 2000 people in Shacheng, Fuding in northern Fujian also speak Puxian. Overseas populations of Puxian speakers exist in Malaysia and Singapore. Speakers of Puxian are also known as Henghua , Hinghua, or Xinghua.

Puxian have 15 consonants, including zero consonant, the same as most of other Min directs. Puxian have lateral fricative instead of in other Min dialects.

Puxian have 40 finals and 7 .

Proto-Mandarin

Proto-Mandarin is a term that can be used to designate any earlier form of the most widely-spoken dialect, known in as ; technically the "late Middle Chinese" of the Song Dynasty. "Early Mandarin" is the common name for the sound system described by the rhyme dictionary ''Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn'' of the later Yuan dynasty, used for rhyming of Zaju of that time.

Practical Chinese Reader

Practical Chinese Reader is a series of Chinese language teaching books developed to teach non-Chinese speakers to speak Chinese. The reader follows the antics of Palanka and Gubo through various stages. ''Practical Chinese Reader'' is administered by the Chinese Department of Culture and most students of in a classroom setting probably have contact with the book. The course consists of a Chinese reader, character workbook, and grammar workbook.

''New Practical Chinese Reader''

''New Practical Chinese Reader'' was released in 1981 by Beijing Language and Culture University Press, and the original ''Practical Chinese Reader'' was not reprinted. In the new version older words are removed but the sentence structure and grammar remains intact. There are currently six volumes. This book pays homage to the older edition by introducing a new character, Libo, who is the son of Gubo and Ding Yun.

English Version , German version, French Version, Russian version are available. Other language versions are to be published soon.

The characters

Gubo : Young male student, non-Chinese. The name's transliteration is uncertain but Cooper or Gilbert has been suggested.

Palanka : Young female student, non Chinese, Gubo's friend. Chosen as a Western sounding name. Her english name may possibly be Veronica.

Ding Yun : Young female student, Chinese, Palanka's friend.

Ding Libo : Son of Gubo and Ding Yun. Introduced in the ''NPCR''.

Page two of the ''NPCR'' reads:

A Canadian Student,
aged 21, male
Gubo is his father
Ding Yun is his mother.

In accordance with keeping the dialogue the same, the characters are given universal names in translations of the book across all languages.

Pinghua

Pínghuà , also Guangxi Nanning, is a subdivision of . It is spoken in parts of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region and some in Hunan province. It is usually classified together with Cantonese.

Pinghua is a formerly unclassified dialect spoken by about 2 million people. When Chinese is grouped into 7 languages rather than 10, Pinghua is grouped together with Cantonese, and there is some debate about considering it a separate language. Many local people in Nanning consider there to be four "dialects" spoken in the area, namely Cantonese, Pinghua, and , which are not mutually intelligible. According to Wu Wei in 2001, "Pinghua is only a branch of Cantonese rather than an independent dialect group."

Like all other varieties of , there is plenty of dispute as to whether Pinghua is a language or a dialect. See Identification of the varieties of Chinese for the issues surrounding this dispute.

Penang Hokkien

Penang Hokkien is a local variant of spoken in Penang, Malaysia. It is the ''lingua franca'' in Penang as well as other northern states of Malaysia surrounding it, and is characterised by the pronunciation of words according to the Zhangzhou dialect, together with widespread use of and borrowed words. It is predominantly a spoken dialect: it is rarely written in , and there is no standard romanisation. This article uses the Missionary Romanisation or ''Pe?h-ōe-jī'' which is common in Taiwan.

Minnan is one of the sub-languages of the Chinese language and is mainly spoken in southern Fujian, Taiwan, Hainan and parts of Guangdong, with the main standard dialects being Hokkien, and . Within Hokkien, the Amoy dialect is the prestige dialect. It is also spoken by many overseas Chinese in Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia.

Penang Hokkien is based on the dialect of Hokkien spoken in the Zhangzhou prefecture of Fujian. It is said that it most closely resembles the dialect spoken in the district of Haicang in Longhai county and in the districts of Jiaomei and Xinglin in neighbouring Xiamen prefecture. In Southeast Asia, similar dialects are spoken in the states bordering Penang, and in . In contrast, in southern Malaysia and Singapore, most Hokkien speakers speak a dialect based on the Amoy standard.

Tones

In Penang Hokkien, there are in total seven . However, as some tones are nearly identical, most native speakers of Penang Hokkien are only aware of four or five tones. The seven tones are:



The names of the tones no longer bear any relation to the tone contours, e.g. the Rising tone actually falls. As in Amoy and Zhangzhou, the Rising tone is not distinguished into upper and lower, and there is thus no 6th tone. As in Zhangzhou, the two Departing tones are virtually identical, except in their sandhi forms.

Tone sandhi

Like in other Minnan dialects, the tone of a syllable in Penang Hokkien depends on where in a phrase or sentence the relevant syllable is placed. For example, the word 牛 gu⁵ in isolation is pronounced with an ascending tone, , but when it combines with a following syllable, as in 牛肉 gu⁵-bah⁴, it is pronounced with to a low level tone, .



The rules which apply when a syllable is placed in front of a connected syllable in standard Minnan, simply put, are as follows:

* 1st becomes 7th
* 7th becomes 3rd
* 3rd becomes 2nd
* 2nd becomes 1st
* 5th becomes 7th
Checked syllables:
* 4th becomes 8th
* 8th becomes 4th

Although the two departing tones are usually difficult to tell apart in Penang Hokkien, their tone contours being and , in their sandhi forms they become and and are thus easily distinguishable. For more detailed rules on the Hokkien tone sandhi, see Taiwanese.

Minnan and Mandarin tones

There is a reasonably reliable correspondence between Hokkien and Mandarin tones:

* Upper Level: Hokkien 1st tone = Mandarin 1st tone, e.g. 雞 ke¹ / jī.
* Lower Level: Hokkien 5th tone = Mandarin 2nd tone, e.g. 龍 leng⁵ / lóng.
* Rising: Hokkien 2nd tone = Mandarin 3rd tone, e.g. 馬 bε² / mǎ.
* Departing: Hokkien 3rd/7th tones = Mandarin 4th tone, e.g. 兔 th?³ / tù, 象 chhi??⁷ / xiàng.

Words with Entering tones all end with -p, -t, -k or -h . As Mandarin no longer has any entering tones, there is no corresponding relationship for the Hokkien 4^th and 8^th tones, e.g. 國 kok⁴ / guó, but 發 hoat⁴ / fā.

Literary and colloquial pronunciations

Hokkien has not been taught in schools in Penang since the establishment of the Republic of China in 1911, when Mandarin was made the Chinese national language. As such, few if any people have received any formal instruction in the language, and it is not used for literary purposes. However, as in other variants of Minnan, most words have both literary and colloquial pronunciations, and the literary pronunciations still appear in limited circumstances, e.g.:

* in given names , e.g. 安 an¹ rather than oa?¹, 玉 giok⁸ rather than gek⁸
* in a few surnames, e.g. 葉 iap⁸ rather than hioh⁸
* in other proper names, e.g. 龍山堂 Liong⁵-san¹-tong⁵ rather than Leng⁵-soa?¹-tong⁵
* in certain set phrases, e.g. 差不多 chha¹-put⁴-to¹ rather than chhε¹-m⁷-to¹, 見笑 kien³-siau³ rather than ki?³-chhio³

Unlike in Taiwan and mainland China, the literary pronunciations of numbers higher than two are not used when giving telephone numbers, etc. Literary variants are generally eschewed in favour of colloquial pronunciations, e.g. 大學 toa⁷-oh⁸ instead of tai⁷-hak⁸.

Differences from standard Minnan

Most of the differences between Penang Hokkien and Amoy Hokkien exist also in Zhangzhou, e.g.:

* The use of -ui? where Amoy has -ng, e.g. 門 mui?⁵, 飯 pui?⁷, 酸 sui?¹, etc.;
* The use of -ε and -ε? where Amoy has -e and -i?, e.g. 家 kε¹, 蝦 hε⁵, 生 sε?¹;
* The use of -oe where Amoy has -e and ''vice versa'', e.g. 火 hoe², 未 boe⁷, 地 te⁷, 細 se³;
* The use of -oa where Amoy has -oe, e.g. 話 oa⁷, 花 hoa¹, 瓜 koa¹;
* The use of -i?? where Amoy has -iu?, e.g. 羊 i??⁵, 丈 ti??⁷, 想 si??⁷;
* The use of -iang where Amoy has -iong, e.g. 上 siang⁷, 香 hiang¹;
* The use of j- in some words where Amoy has l-, e.g. 入 jip⁸, 熱 joah⁸, 日 jit⁸;
* The use of Zhangzhou pronunciations such as 糜 moai⁵ , 先生 sin¹-sε?¹ , etc.;
* The use of Zhangzhou expressions such as 挑羹 thau¹-kiong¹

Differences from the Zhangzhou dialect

Although Penang Hokkien is obviously based on the Zhangzhou dialect, there are some obvious differences, which in many cases result from the influence of other Minnan dialects, e.g.:

* The lower-entering tone in Penang, which is pronounced high as in Amoy and many other parts of Fujian, whereas in most Zhangzhou dialects it is low with a slight lilt ;
* The use of -u in some words such as 汝 lu², 豬 tu¹, 魚 hu⁵, etc., where Zhangzhou has li², ti¹ and hi⁵. This is a characteristic of dialects in other parts of Zhangzhou and Xiamen prefectures.
* The adoption of pronunciations from : e.g. 我 wa² , 我人 uang²¹, 汝人 luang²¹, 伊人 iang¹
* The adoption of Amoy and Quanzhou pronunciations like 否勢 phai?²-se³ , 百 pah⁸ , etc.
* The use of unique variants such as 甚物 ha?²-mih⁸ .

Borrowed words

Malay

Like other dialects in Malaysia and Singapore, Penang Hokkien borrows heavily from Malay, but sometimes to a greater extent, e.g.:

*''balai'': police station
*''balu '': new, just now
*''batu'': stone
*''berlian'': diamond
*''jamban'': toilet
*''jambu'': guava
*''kahwin'': marry
*''kisien '': pity
*''mana'': as if?, since when?
*''mata'': police
*''manik'': bead
*''loti '': bread
*''sabun'', soap
*''suka'', to like
*''tapi'', but
*''tuala'', towel
*''sampah'', garbage

There are also many Hokkien words which have been borrowed into Malay, often with slightly different meanings, e.g. 樓頂 ''loteng'' , 馬車 ''beca'' , 麵 mi , 米粉 ''bihun'' , 先生 ''sinseh'' , 茶 ''teh'' , 茶壺 ''teko'' , 粿 ''kuih'' , 豆腐 ''tauhu'' , 中華 ''Tionghua'' , 鮭汁 ''kicap'' , 瓜子 ''kuaci'' , 日本 ''Jepun'' , etc.

English

Penang Hokkien has also borrowed some words from English, some of which may have been borrowed via Malay, but these tend to be more technical and less well embedded than the Malay words, e.g. brake, park, pipe, pump, etc.

English words borrowed from Hokkien include 茶 tea and 鮭汁 ketchup.

Old Chinese

Old Chinese , or ''Archaic Chinese'' as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the spoken from the Shang Dynasty , well into the Former Han Dynasty . There are several distinct sub-periods within that long period of time. The term, in contrast to Middle Chinese and Modern Chinese, is usually used in historical Chinese phonology, which tries to reconstruct the way in which Old Chinese was pronounced.

Since Old Chinese was the language spoken by the Chinese when such as the ''Analects of Confucius'', the ''Mencius'', and the ''Tao Te Ching'' were written, and was the official language of the unified empire of the Qin Dynasty and long-lasting Han Dynasty, Old Chinese was preserved for the following two in the form of Classical Chinese, a style of written Chinese that emulates the grammar and vocabulary of Old Chinese as presented in those works. During that time, Classical Chinese was the usual language used for official purposes in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. However, there is great variation within Classical Chinese, based mainly on when something was written, and the Classical Chinese of more recent writers, as well as that found outside of China, would probably be difficult for someone from Confucius's era to understand.

Phonology

:''For the pronunciation of Classical Chinese, see

Since Chinese is written with characters, not , it is not easy for the Chinese to notice that the . The story of the reconstruction of Old Chinese began with the recitation of ''Shijing'', the first and most revered collection of poetry in China. Generations of Chinese literati were baffled to find that many lines in ''Shijing'' didn't rhyme smoothly, being unaware that the sounds of the Chinese language had long changed. Scholars such as Zhu Xi suggested that the ancients had their own way of reciting poems: they would change the reading of a character temporarily to fit the rhyming scheme. Such a way of reciting or reading poetry is called ''xieyin'' .

Jiao Hong and Chen Di of the Ming Dynasty were the first persons to argue coherently that the lines in ''Shijing'' didn't rhyme just because the sounds had changed. The reconstruction of Old Chinese began when Gu Yanwu of the Qing Dynasty divided the sounds of Old Chinese into 10 groups . Other Qing scholars followed Gu's steps, refining the division. The Swedish sinologist, Bernhard Karlgren, was the first person to reconstruct Old Chinese with Latin alphabet .

The sounds of Old Chinese are difficult to reconstruct, because the way the Chinese writing system indicates pronunciation is much less clear than the way an alphabet does. Scholars who try to reconstruct the phonology of Old Chinese have to rely on indirect evidence. They heavily rely on those rhymed pre-Qin texts, chiefly ''Shijing'', and the fact that were homophones or near-homophones when the characters were first created.

There is much dispute over the phonology of Old Chinese. Today it is agreed that Old Chinese had consonant clusters such as ''*kl-'' and ''gl-'', which do not occur in any modern Chinese dialect. However, the following issues are still open to debate:
*that Old Chinese had consonants or other rare features.
*that Old Chinese was not monosyllabic.
*that Early Old Chinese was not a tonal language. The tones of Middle Chinese evolved from consonants in Old Chinese that had since changed or disappeared.

Lexicon

The traditional view is that Chinese is an without inflection. However, since Henri Maspero's pioneering work, there have been scholars seriously studying the of Old Chinese. Sagart provides a summary of these efforts, and a word-list based on his work is available at the Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database .

Grammar

The grammar of Old Chinese is not identical to that of Classical Chinese. Many usages found in Classical Chinese are absent in Old Chinese. For example, the word 其 can be used as a third-person pronoun in Classical Chinese, but not in Old Chinese, where it serves as a third-person possessive adjective .

There is no in Old Chinese, the copula 是 in Middle and modern Chinese being a near demonstrative in Old Chinese.

Nogeoldae

The Nogeoldae is an old foreign language textbook published in Korea. At first it dealt only with the Chinese language, but later various tongues from elsewhere. This book has a weighty status in Chinese historical linguistics for its abundant, valuable data.

Text

The book mainly consists of dialogues. A merchant from Goryeo and his relatives travel from Wanggyeong to Dadu , and on their way they happen to get Chinese companions. In Dadu, they sell Korean commodities and purchase goods to sell in their country. They eventually depart from Dadu, and their route comes to an end,

After the first Chinese edition, two major revisions have been issued; Some were translated into other languages, while others made into guidebooks in Hangul.

The first Chinese edition seems to have been written in the late Goryeo Dynasty. A copy discovered in Daegu in 1998 is considered the closest to the original version. It includes valuable information on the colloquial Northern Chinese language around the 14th century.

Since the original version became obsolete from the , a revised edition was produced in 1480s. A Korean scholar Choi Sejin wrote a guidebook based on it, called ''Beonyeok Nogeoldae'' . This contains the pronunciation of the Chinese language as well as its meaning in , both recorded in Hangul. In 1670 he put out another book called ''Nogeoldae Eonhae'' .

During the period, the text was revised again to adjust contemporary Chinese. the ''Nogeoldae Sinseok'' was published in 1761, and the ''Junggan Nogeoldae'' appeared in 1795. The commentaries corresponding to them are called ''Nogeoldae Sinseok Eonhae'' and the ''Junggan Nogeoldae Eonhae'' .

The ''Nogeoldae'' was translated into other languages.
The ''Cheong-eo Nogeoldae'' includes the text along with Hangul pronunciation and Korean translations. It was written by Choe Hutaek and others and published in 1680.
I Choedae made a edition called the ''Mong-eo Nogeoldae'' that was published in 1741.

Ningbo dialect

Ningbo dialect is a dialect of , one of the subdivisions of Chinese spoken language. It is spoken in the city of Ningbo and surrounding areas in Zhejiang province. Its native speakers generally understand Shanghainese, but not vice-versa. It is not at all mutually intelligible with Mandarin, China's official language.

Vocabulary

this is in zhuyin
no diacritics as of now, im looking for them

ㄋㄨㄥ=you

兀ㄡ=I

ㄐㄧ=him/her

for are and four, since i dont have the diacritics but i know they have different tones im leaving them like that for now.

ㄙ=are
ㄙ=4

兀ㄇㄚ=mother

兀ㄇㄜ=don't have

ㄨㄚㄙㄥ=monkey

ㄡ=feces

兀=five

Nanchang dialect

Nanchang dialect is a dialect of the language family, which in turn constitutes one of the . It is spoken in Nanchang in the Jiangxi province.

Classification

Geographic distribution

Dialects

Phonetics and Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Monophthongs

Diphthongs

s

Nanchang has 5 tones, which are neutralized before a syllable-final stop.

Citation tones

Tone Sandhi

Grammar

Syntax

Vocabulary

History

Examples

Mojikyo

Mojikyo is a set of computer software and s for enhanced logogram word-processing. , it collected 126,560/142,228 characters . Among them, 101,936/128,573 characters belong to the extended CJK family . Many of the characters are obsolete and not included in Unicode.

Premise

The Mojikyo fonts were created as a method of providing a complete documentary of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese Characters. It was created in order to provide an easy method to compile large selections of Chinese Characters as well as Japanese and Korean Characters. This is in addition to a large selection as well of various ancient scripts.

Composition

Mojikyo fonts come in a series of zip files around 2-5 megabytes each and contain varying numbers of characters. Characters include the Modern Latin Alphabet, as well as a variety of various markers most seen in the Arial font, in addition to various Ancient scripts. All of this comes with a Character map that allows the user to browse through his downloaded Mojikyo fonts, copying and pasting such fonts in lieu of not having the ability to easily type them on a keyboard.

Collected writing systems

Living

* — Hanzi
* — Kanji, Kana
* — Hanja
* Latin alphabet with diacritics
* Cyrillic alphabet with diacritics

Dead or obsolete

* Ancient Chinese
** Oracle bone script: 3,354 characters
** Seal script: 10,969 characters
* Taiwanese kana
* — Ch? N?m
* — Siddham: 1,875 characters
* Tangut script: 6,000 characters
* script: 145 characters

Min Zhong

The Central Min language, or Min Zhong is a subcategory of , which is a Chinese language. It is spoken around Yong'an,Sanming areas in Fujian. Most speakers of Central Min live in Middle-Fujian.

Min Nan

The Southern Min language, or Min Nan refers to a family of Chinese languages/dialects which are spoken in southern Fujian and neighboring areas, and by descendants of in diaspora. In common parlance, Southern Min usually refers to , in particular and Taiwanese. and Taiwanese are both combinations of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou speech. The Southern Min family also includes and . has limited mutual intelligibilty with . However, Hainanese is generally not considered to be mutually intelligible with any other Southern Min variants.

Southern Min forms part of the , alongside several other divisions. The Min languages/dialects are part of the Chinese language group, itself a member of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Southern Min is not with , , or . As with other varieties of , there is a political dispute as to whether the Southern Min language should be called a language or a dialect.

Geographic distribution

Southern Min is spoken in the southern part of Fujian province, three southeastern counties of Zhejiang province, the Zhoushan archipelago off Ningbo in Zhejiang, and the eastern part of Guangdong province . The Qiong Wen variant spoken in the Leizhou peninsula of Guangdong province, as well as Hainan province, which is not mutually intelligible with standard Minnan or Teochew, is classified in some schemes as part of Southern Min and in other schemes as separate.

A form of Southern Min akin to that spoken in southern Fujian is also spoken in Taiwan, where it has the native name of T?i-o?n-oē or . The ethnic group for which Southern Min is considered a native language is known as the or , the main ethnicity of Taiwan. The correspondence between language and ethnicity is generally true though not absolute, as some Hoklo have very limited proficiency in Southern Min while some non-Hoklos speak Southern Min fluently.

There are many Southern Min speakers also among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. Many ethnic emigrants to the region were Hoklo from southern Fujian, and brought the language to what is now Indonesia and present day Malaysia and Singapore . In general, Southern Min from southern Fujian is known as Hokkien, Hokkienese, Fukien or Fookien in Southeast Asia, and is extremely similar to Taiwanese. Many Southeast Asian ethnic Chinese also originated in Chaoshan region of Guangdong province and speak , the variant of Southern Min from that region. Southern Min is reportedly the native language of up to 98.5% of the in the Philippines, among whom it is also known as Lan-nang or Lán-l?ng-oē . Southern Min speakers form the majority of Chinese in Singapore with the largest being Hoklos and the second largest being the Teochews.

Classification

Southern Fujian is home to three main dialects. They are known by the geographic locations to which they correspond :

* Quanzhou
* Xiamen
* Zhangzhou

As Xiamen is the principal city of southern Fujian, the Xiamen dialect is considered the most important, or even prestige dialect. The Xiamen dialect is a hybrid of the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou dialects. Xiamen and the Amoy dialect have played an influential role in history, especially in the relations of nations with China, and was one of the most frequently learned of all Chinese languages/dialects by ers during the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century.

The variants of Southern Min spoken in Zhejiang province are most akin to that spoken in Quanzhou. The variants spoken in Taiwan are similar to the three Fujian variants, and are collectively known as Taiwanese. Taiwanese is used by a majority of the population and bears much importance from a socio-political perspective, forming the second major pole of the language. Those Southern Min variants that are collectively known as "Hokkien" in Southeast Asia also originate from these variants. The variants of Southern Min in the Chaoshan region of eastern Guangdong province are collectively known as or Chaozhou. Teochew is of great importance in the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora, particularly in Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Sumatra and western Kalimantan.

The Southern Min language variant spoken around Shanwei and Haifeng differs markedly from Teochew and may represent a later migration from Zhangzhou. Linguistically, it lies between Teochew and Amoy. In southwestern Fujian, the local variants in Longyan and Zhangping form a separate division of Min Nan on their own. Among ethnic Chinese inhabitants of Penang, Malaysia and Medan, Indonesia, a distinct form of Zhangzhou Hokkien has developed. In Penang, it is called Penang Hokkien while across the Malacca Strait in Medan, an almost identical variant is known as .

Phonology

The Southern Min language has one of the most diverse phonology of Chinese variants, with more consonants than standard Mandarin or Cantonese. Vowels, on the other hand, are more or less similar to that of Standard Mandarin.

Initials

Southern Min has , unaspirated as well as voiced consonant initials. This distinction makes Southern Min one of the harder dialects for non-native speakers to learn. For example, the words for opening and closing a door have the same vowel but differ only by aspiration of the initial and nasality of the vowel. In addition, Southern Min also has labial initial consonants such as m in m?-sī .

Finals

Unlike Mandarin, Southern Min retains all the final consonants of Middle Chinese. While Mandarin only preserves the n and ? finals, Southern Min also preserves the m, p, t and k finals and developed the ? .

Vowels

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Tones

In general, Southern Min variants have seven to eight s, and tone sandhi is extensive. There are minor variations between the Quanzhou and Zhangzhou tone systems. The Teochew tone system differs significantly from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou speech. Taiwanese tones follow the schemes of Amoy and Zhangzhou, depending on the area of Taiwan. See also and for more examples.

:

Comparison

is a hybrid of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou speech. Taiwanese is also a hybrid of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou speech. Taiwanese in northern Taiwan tends to be based on Quanzhou speech, whereas the Taiwanese spoken in southern Taiwan tends to be based on Zhangzhou speech. There are minor variations in pronunciation and vocabulary between Quanzhou and Zhangzhou speech. The grammar is basically the same. Additionally, Taiwanese includes several dozen loanwords from . In contrast, speech is significantly different from Quanzhou and Zhangzhou speech in both pronunciation and vocabulary.

Mutual intelligibility

*Spoken: Quanzhou speech, Xiamen speech, Zhangzhou speech and Taiwanese are mutually intelligible. Chaozhou speech and Amoy speech are 84.3% phonetically similar and 33.8% lexically similar, whereas Mandarin and Amoy Min Nan are 62% phonetically similar and 15.1% lexically similar. In comparison, German and English are 60% lexically similar. In other words, Chao-Shan, including Swatow , has very low intelligibility with Amoy, and Amoy and Teochew are not mutually intelligible with Mandarin. However, many Amoy and Teochew speakers speak Mandarin as a second or third language.
*Written: Southern Min dialects lack a standardized written language. Southern Min speakers are taught how to read Standard Mandarin in school. As a result, there has not been an urgent need to develop a writing system. In recent years, an increasing number of Southern Min Language speakers have become interested in developing a standard writing system . For a phonological and lexical comparison of major Sino-tibetan languages , see .

Scripts and orthographies

Like most ethnic , whether from mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, or other parts of Southeast Asia, when writing , Southern Min Language speakers use Chinese characters as in Standard Mandarin, although there are a number of special characters which are unique to Southern Min Language and sometimes used in informal writing . Where standard Chinese characters are used, they are not always etymological or genetic; the borrowing of similar-sounding or similar-meaning characters is a common practice.

Romanization

Southern Min, especially Taiwanese, can be written with the Latin alphabet using a orthography called Pe?h-ōe-jī, or POJ . POJ was developed first by Presbyterian missionaries in China and later by the indigenous Presbyterian Church in Taiwan; use of the orthography has been actively promoted since the late 19th century. The use of a mixed orthography of Han characters and romanization is also seen, though remains uncommon. Other Latin-based orthographies also exist. Earlier scripts in Southern Min Language can be dated back to the 16th century. One example is the "Doctrina Christiana en letra y lengua china," presumably written after 1587 by the Spanish Dominicans in the Philippines. Another is a Ming Dynasty script of a play called ''Romance of the Lychee Mirror'' , supposedly the earliest Southern Min colloquial text.

Computing

Southern Min is registered per RFC 3066 as .

When writing Southern Min in characters, some writers create 'new' characters when they consider it impossible to use directly or borrow existing ones; this corresponds to similar practices in character usage in Cantonese, , and . These are usually not encoded in Unicode , thus creating problems in computer processing.

All Latin characters required by Pe?h-oē-jī can be represented using Unicode , using precomposed or combining characters. Prior to June 2004, the vowel akin to but more open than ''o'', written with a dot above right, was not encoded. The usual workaround was to use the character ''Interpunct'' or less commonly the combining character ''dot above'' . As these are far from ideal, since 1997 proposals have been submitted to the ISO/IEC working group in charge of ISO/IEC 10646—namely, —to encode a new combining character ''dot above right''. This is now officially assigned to U+0358 . Font support is expected to follow.

Min Dong

The Eastern Min language, or Min Dong is the language mainly spoken in the eastern part of Fujian Province in China, in and near Fuzhou and Ningde, the province's capital and largest city. Fuzhou dialect is considered the standard form of the Eastern Min Language.

The ISO 639-3 abbreviation for Eastern Min, used by Wikipedia, is cdo.

Min Chinese

Min is a general term for a group of of the Chinese spoken language found in the southeastern of Fujian as well as by migrants from this province in Guangdong , Hainan, three counties in southern Zhejiang, and Zhoushan archipelago off Ningbo, and Taiwan. There are many Min speakers also among overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. The most widely spoken variety of Min is , which includes Taiwanese and , amongst other dialects.

Divisions

Like all groups of Chinese spoken languages, Min has a widespread diaspora of its own, with numerous dialects which are not mutually intelligible in and amongst themselves. Min is typically divided, on the basis of mutual unintelligibility, into Min Dong , , and other sub-groups. Min Dong is centered around the city of Fuzhou , capital of Fujian province, while Min Nan is dominant in most other locations. Qiong Wen, spoken in Hainan, is sometimes classed as a separate sub-group, but often viewed as part of Min Nan.

Min Nan is also called by the name of its regional variants in the places it is spoken, especially Taiwanese. The Amoy dialect of Xiamen is the prestige dialect of Min Nan in mainland China, with also being an important sub-variant. Teochew has low intelligibility with other Minnan dialects, having fewer words in common with them than German has with English.

More complex division is suggested by : , Central Min , Eastern Min , Xinghua and Southern Min . Southern Min is also spoken by Fujian or Hoklo people who have settled in Guangdong, Taiwan, Hainan, etc.

The language in Guangdong is known as ''Hoklo'', in Hainan as ''Qiong Wen'' or ''Qiongzhou hua'' . Min Nan is the dominant Chinese dialect spoken by the Chinese minority in the Philippines, where it is known as Lan-nang. In Taiwan, Minnan is known as ''Hō-ló-oē'' and is spoken by the majority of the population as their native language. In Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and other areas in Southeast Asia, Minnan is known as , in addition to the variant, originating in the Chaoshan region, which is the ancestral home of many .

Writing system

When using Chinese characters to write Min, the writing system is largely identical to that of Standard Mandarin, with the addition of some specialized characters. Given that Min is the only branch of Chinese that cannot be directly derived from Middle Chinese, one may have trouble finding the appropriate Chinese characters for some Min vocabulary. In the case of Taiwanese, there are also indigenous words loaned from the Taiwanese aborigines, as well as a substantial number of loan words from . In Singapore and Malaysia, the Min variants spoken have borrowed heavily from and to a lesser extent, from and other languages.

Some Min speakers use the Church Romanization . For Min Nan the romanization is called Pe?h-ōe-jī and for Min Dong called Bàng-u?-cê . Both systems were created by foreign missionaries in the 19th century . There are some uncommon publications in mixed writing, using mostly Chinese characters but using the Latin alphabet to represent words that cannot easily be represented by Chinese characters.

Min Bei

The Northern Min language, or Min Bei is a collection of mutually intelligible dialects of spoken in Nanping in northwestern Fujian. The Chinese languages in Fujian are traditionally divided into northern Min and or Min Nan. However, Min divide Min more finely into eastern Min, Puxian, southern Min, central Min and northern Min. By the narrow definition, northern Min is represented by the dialects of Shibei , Chong'an , Xingtian , Wufu , Zhenghe , Zhengqian , Jianyang and Jian'ou.

Middle Chinese

Middle Chinese , or ''Ancient Chinese'' as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the , , and dynasties . The term "Middle Chinese", in contrast to Old Chinese and Modern Chinese, is usually used in the context of historical Chinese phonology, which seeks to reconstruct the pronunciation of Chinese used during these times.

Middle Chinese can be divided into an early period, generally called Early Middle Chinese, and a later period, Late Middle Chinese. The transition point between Early and Later Middle Chinese is thought to be during the Mid-Tang Dynasty and is indicated by phonological developments. For example, in the rime book ''Qieyun'', s characters are shown, but there were no initials like ''f'' and ''v'', which can be found in ''Jiyun''. This indicates that a sound change in the pronunciation of Chinese occurred in the four centuries after the appearance of Qieyun.

Reconstruction

The reconstruction of Middle Chinese by different modern linguists varies slightly, but the differences are minor and fairly uncontroversial, indicating that Middle Chinese phonology is now fairly well understood and accepted. Chinese is not written using an alphabetic script, therefore, sounds cannot be derived directly from writing. The sounds of Middle Chinese must therefore be inferred from a number of sources:

*Modern languages. Just as can be reconstructed from modern Indo-European languages, so can Middle Chinese be reconstructed from modern Sinitic languages .
*Preserved pronunciation of Chinese characters in borrowed Chinese vocabulary surviving in non-Chinese languages such as , and
*Classical Chinese poetry from the Middle Chinese period
*. For example, "Dravida" was translated by religious scribes into a series of characters 達羅毗荼 that are now read in as /ta35 luo35 phi35 thu35/ . This suggests that Mandarin /uo/ is the modern reflex of an ancient /a/-like sound, and that the Mandarin /35/ is a reflex of ancient voiced consonants. Both of these can in fact be confirmed through comparison among modern Chinese dialects.
*Rime books . Ancient Chinese philologists devoted a great amount of effort in summarizing the Chinese phonetic system through rime or rhyme books. There was a profuse output of Chinese poetry during the Tang era, with a rigid verse structure that relied on the rime and tone of the final characters in lines of poetry. Middle Chinese as embodied in rime books were a primary aid to authors in composing poetry. The 601 AD ''Qieyun'' rime dictionary is our earliest fixed record of the phonology of Chinese pronunciation, albeit without the aid of phonetic letters, but entries that are indexed under a rigorous hierarchy of tone, rime, and onset. Only fragments or incomplete copies were known until a chance discovery of a version from the Tang Dynasty in the caves of Dunhuang. Later expanded rime dictionaries such as the eleventh-century Song Dynasty ''Guangyun'' and ''Jiyun'' survive to the present day. These are essentially extended versions of the ''Qieyun'', and until the Dunhuang discovery, the ''Guangyun'' was the base from which Middle Chinese was reconstructed.

Reconstructed phonology

Middle Chinese had three types of stops: voiced, voiceless, and voiceless aspirated. Syllables could end with stops. Middle Chinese had more vowels than its descendants, such as /?/, which merged into similar phonemes later on. Affricate and fricative sibilants had three levels of distinction as they do in Mandarin. Some Sinologists believe that Old Chinese or an early state of Middle Chinese originally had consonant clusters such as /d?/ which became retroflex sounds.

Martian language

Martian language is a term to describe words beyond common knowledge in the speaking cyberspace. The term was popularised by a quote from the 2001 Hong Kong comedy film ''Shaolin Soccer'', in which Stephen Chow tells Zhao Wei: "Go back to Mars, the Earth is so dangerous." Since then, people who seem strange to local culture are often called Martians in cyberspace, and strange Internet slang words are often called words in the Martian language.

In the 2006 Taiwanese national College Entrance Examination, students were asked to interpret symbols and phrases written in "Martian language" , and the controversies followed forced the testing center to abandon the practice in future exams.

In 2007, "Martian language" began to be popular in mainland China. The first adopters of "Martian language" mainly consisted of post-1990s students. They use it in their nicknames, short messages and in chatting rooms in order to demonstrate personality differences. Later they found that their teachers and parents could hardly figure out their new language, which very quickly became their secret tools to communicate with each others.

The "Martian language" became so popular in cyberspace that even some software were created to translate between Chinese and "Martian language".

Chinese internet bloggers followed up the trend to use "Martian language", because they found that their blog posts written in the new language can easily pass internet censorship engines, which are currently based on text-matching techniques.

Mandarin dialects

, when used in the broad sense to refer to most of the Chinese dialects spoken over northern and southwestern China, covers many variations. This is manifested in two ways:

# Various dialects of Mandarin cover a huge area containing nearly a billion people. As a result, there are pronounced regional variations in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar encountered as one moves from place to place. These regional differences are as pronounced as the regional versions of the English language found in England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the United States. A northeastern dialect speaker and a southwestern dialect speaker can hardly communicate.
# Standard Mandarin has been promoted very actively by the , the , and Singapore as a second language. As a result, native speakers of both Mandarin varieties and non-Mandarin Chinese varieties frequently flavor it with a strong infusion of the speech sounds of their native tongues. , for instance, has become a fairly consistent variant of standard Mandarin as defined by educational authorities. Mandarin is also sometimes imprecisely referred to as Beijingese , or a "Beijing drawl" ''Jīng piànzi'' . Taiwanese sometimes using the term ''Beijing hua'' instead of ''Guoyu'' , especially for those people who advocate that Taiwanese should be one of their official languages.

Dialect division

Generally speaking, the local pronunciations of people from other Mandarin-speaking areas depart more and more from the standard as distance from Beijing increases. Some areas, such as Heilongjiang, have pronunciations that are not significantly different from the standard, though this is the exception rather than the rule. Cities very close to Beijing, such as Tianjin, Baoding, Shenyang, or Dalian, already have pronunciations that are markedly different. In general Mandarin can be divided into the following dialect areas:

* Beijing and environs, such as Chengde, Hebei. The basis of Standard Mandarin. Areas of recent large-scale immigration such as northern Xinjiang speak Standard Mandarin or something very close to it; hence the dialects of those areas are also classified as within the Beijing dialect group.
* , or that spoken in the northeast of China , except the Liaodong Peninsula
* , or that spoken in Hebei and Shandong provinces, except the Jiaodong Peninsula
* , or that spoken in Peninsula and Liaodong Peninsula
* , or that spoken in Henan province, the central parts of Shaanxi in the Yellow River valley, and southern Xinjiang
* , or that spoken in Gansu province and Ningxia autonomous region , as well as northern Xinjiang. The Dungan language, a Chinese-derived language spoken in Kyrgyzstan, also belongs to this category
* Southwestern, or that spoken in the provinces of Hubei, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, and the Mandarin-speaking areas of Guangxi
* Jiang-huai , spoken in the parts of Jiangsu and Anhui on the north bank of the , as well as some areas on the south bank, such as Nanjing, Jiangsu; Jiujiang, Jiangxi; etc.

In addition, is sometimes categorized under Mandarin, as the Qin-jin subdivision. However, current practice tends to set it apart as a separate division on equal footing with Mandarin.

See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of major Chinese dialects, including Mandarin dialects.

Phonology

Due to differences in pronunciation, not all variations of spoken Mandarin are readily mutually intelligible. Specifically, according to SIL International :

:''Mandarin varieties in the Lower Plateau in Shaanxi are not readily intelligible with Putonghua . Mandarin varieties of Guilin and Kunming are inherently unintelligible to speakers of Putonghua.''

In addition, persons speaking forms of Mandarin which are not completely intelligible with Standard Mandarin will often conceptualize their speech as distinct from Standard Mandarin. Educated speakers of the official language of instruction living in southwestern cities such as Guilin and Kunming will be found to speak quite adequate Standard Mandarin, as well as their own mother tongue. However, they will conceptualize their mother tongue to be different from Standard Mandarin.

In addition, it is not uncommon for two speakers who both think of themselves as speaking Standard Mandarin to find it difficult to understand each other.

Initials

A generalized table for the initials of the Mandarin dialects is as follows. Initials not present in Standard Mandarin are inside parentheses.



* The retroflex initials are missing in many dialects of Manchuria and southern China, where they are replaced by the alveolar sibilants . This is also common in the Mandarin spoken in Taiwan. Most other Mandarin-speaking areas do distinguish between the retroflex and alveolar sibilants, but they are often in different distribution than in Standard Mandarin.

* The alveolo-palatal sibilants are the result of merger between the historical palatalized velars and palatalized alveolar sibilants . In about 20% of dialects, the alveolar sibilants failed to palatalize, remaining separate from the alveolo-palatal initials. On the other side, in some dialects of eastern Shandong, the velar initials have failed to palatalize.

* Many southwestern Mandarin dialects mix ''f-'' and ''hu-'' , substituting one for the other in some or all cases. For example, ''fei'' "to fly" and ''hui'' "dust" may be merged in these areas.

* In some dialects, initial and are not distinguished. In Southwestern Mandarin, these sounds usually merge to ; in Jianghuai Mandarin, they usually merge to .

* People in many parts of Mandarin-speaking areas use different initial sounds some or most of the time where standard Mandarin uses initial ''r-'' . Common alternatives include ''y-'', ''l-'', ''n-'', and ''w-'' .

* , and , used as initials in earlier forms of Chinese, have merged with the zero initial in most dialects of Mandarin.

* Many dialects of Northwestern and Central Plains Mandarin have where standard Mandarin has . Thus, "pig" for standard Mandarin , "water" for standard Mandarin , "soft" for standard Mandarin , and so forth.

Finals

* In many widely scattered Mandarin dialects, ''ai ei ao ou'' are pronounced as monophthongs .

* Beijing Mandarin and Northeastern Mandarin underwent more vowel mergers than many other varieties of Mandarin. For example:

:Standard Mandarin finals such as ''e'', ''o'', ''ai'', ''ei'', ''ao'', ''u'', ''üe'', and ''ie'' often turn up unpredictably as other vowels in other dialects. The rules are complex and are the result of Middle Chinese phonology undergoing divergent development in different Mandarin dialects.

* The medial ''-u-'' , occurring with an alveolar consonant, is often lost in southwestern Mandarin. Hence we get ''dei'' "right" where standard Mandarin has ''dui'' , ''ten'' "swallow" where standard Mandarin has ''tun'' .

* Southwestern Mandarin have ''gai kai hai'' in a few words where standard Mandarin has ''jie qie xie'' . This is a stereotypical feature of southwestern Mandarin, since it is so easily noticeable. E.g. ''hai'' "shoe" for standard ''xie'', ''gai'' "street" for standard ''jie''.

* In some areas final ''-ng'' changes into ''-n'' . This is especially prevalent in the rhyme pairs ''-en/-eng'' and ''-in/-ing'' . As a result, ''jīn'' "gold" and ''jīng'' "capital" merge in those dialects.

* Some dialects of Mandarin have a final glottal stop in certain words. See the second point under "Tones", below.

* , a characteristic feature of Mandarin, works quite differently in the southwest. Whereas standard Mandarin generally tends to remove only final /j/ or /n/ when adding the rhotic final ''-r'' , in the southwest the ''-r'' replaces the nearly the entire rhyme.

Tones

* In general, no two Mandarin-speaking areas have the exact same set of values. On the other hand, most Mandarin-speaking areas have very similar tone ''distribution'' -- for example, the dialects of Jinan, Chengdu, Xi'an etc. all have 4 tones that correspond quite well to the Beijing tones of , , , and . The exception to this rule lies in the distribution of ancient entering tone words, which are treated differently in different dialects of Mandarin.

* The entering tone, a tone of Middle Chinese, is kept in Jianghuai dialects and a minority of Southwestern dialects. It has short duration compared to the other tones, and wherever it occurs, the syllable ends with a glottal stop . This is in common with non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese, such as and . Older dictionaries such as ''Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary'' mark entering tone characters with a superscript 5.

* Standard Mandarin employs many neutral tones for the second syllables of words -- this is also characteristic of northern dialects. However, in many areas, especially in the south, the tones of both syllables are made clear -- this is also characteristic of non-Mandarin varieties of Chinese in the south.

Tone distribution variation:

V- = obstruent unvoiced initial consonant

L = sonorant voiced initial consonant

V+ = obstruent voiced initial consonant



Tone contour variation:


* Dialects in and around the Nantong area typically have many more than 4 tones, due to influence from the neighbouring .

Vocabulary

In general, the greatest variation occurs in slang, in kinship terms, in names for common crops and domesticated beasts, for common verbs and adjectives, and other such everyday terms. The least variation occurs in "formal" vocabulary -- terms dealing with science, law, or government.

Northeastern Mandarin, in particular, has a number of borrowings from Altaic languages not shared by other varieties of Mandarin.

Grammar

Sentence-final particles

Especially prominent in conversational Chinese, sentence-final particles alter the inherent meaning of a sentence by changing its sentence construction. Much like vocabulary , particles can vary a great deal with regards to the locale. For example, the particle 嘛 , which is used in most northern regionalects to denote obviousness or contention, is replaced by 哟 for southern usage. More examples persist in everyday colloquialism.

Reduplication

One feature of southwestern Mandarin is its frequent use of noun reduplication, which is almost not used in standard Mandarin. In Sichuan, one hears ''baobao'' "handbag" whereas Beijing uses ''bao'r''.

Mandarin and the Educational System

In both Mainland China and Taiwan, Mandarin is taught by immersion starting in elementary school. After the second grade, the entire educational system is in Mandarin, except for local language classes that have been taught for a few hours each week in Taiwan starting in the mid-1990s.

Social Implications

In northern China, Sichuan, and other areas where the "Northern" language is spoken, the local variations of Mandarin are the mother tongues of most of the people who live in those regions. The era of mass education in Mandarin has not erased these earlier regional differences. In the south, the interaction between Mandarin and local variations of Chinese has produced local versions of the "Northern" language that are rather different from that official standard Mandarin in both pronunciation and grammar. For example, the Mandarin spoken in Taiwan by students who speak Taiwanese or Hakka as their mother tongue is usually spoken with a grammar and accent that renders it different from the Kuoyu standard, creating a version of Mandarin commonly known as Taiwanese Mandarin. Similarly in Singapore, the multi-cultural populance as well as large representative groups of various southern Chinese dialect groups has resulted in modifications to its of Mandarin.

Although Mandarin is considered the standard dialect, speaking Mandarin without the local accent or speaking Mandarin instead of the local dialect can mark a person as being an outsider or as someone who is not "a regular guy." Thus most Chinese, including Chinese political leaders themselves, do not bother to learn to speak Mandarin with the official standard accent. In some cases, such as with both Mao Zedong, whose native dialect was Xiang and Chiang Kai-Shek, whos native dialect was Wu , this results in the political leaders' speech being largely unintelligible to large numbers of Chinese. One other consequence of this linguistic diversity, is that Chinese politics does not have a strong tradition of -making and a great amount of political discourse occurs in writing.

Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin , is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and south-western China. When taken as a separate language, as is often done in academic literature, the Mandarin language has more speakers than any other language. The "standard" in Standard Mandarin refers to the standard Beijing dialect of the Mandarin language.

In English, ''Mandarin'' can refer to either of two distinct concepts:
*to Standard Chinese or Standard Mandarin , which is based on the in Beijing. Standard Mandarin functions as the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China, the official language of the Republic of China , and one of the four official languages of Singapore. ‘Chinese’ — in practice Standard Mandarin — is one of the six official languages of the United Nations.
*to all of the Mandarin dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China. This group of dialects is the focus of this article.
In everyday use, ''Mandarin'' refers usually to just Standard Mandarin . In its broader sense, Mandarin is a diverse group of related dialects, some less mutually intelligible than others. It is a grouping defined and used mainly by linguists, and is not commonly used outside of academic circles as a self-description. Instead, when asked to describe the spoken form they are using, Chinese speaking a form of non-Standard Mandarin will describe the variant that they are speaking, for example Southwestern Mandarin or Northeastern Mandarin, and consider it distinct from ‘Standard Mandarin’ ''''; they may not recognize that it is in fact classified by linguists as a form of ‘Mandarin’ in a broader sense. Nor is there a common ‘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 its speakers.

Like all other varieties of , there is significant dispute as to whether Mandarin is a language or a dialect. See Identification of the varieties of Chinese for more on this issue.

History

The present divisions of the Chinese language developed out of the different ways in which dialects of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese evolved.

Most Chinese living in northern and south-western China are native speakers of a dialect of Mandarin. The prevalence of this linguistic homogeneity in northern China is largely the result of geography: much of northern China is covered by plains and is flat. In contrast to this, the mountains and rivers of southern China have promoted linguistic diversity.

Chronologically, there is no clear line to mark where Middle Chinese ends and Mandarin begins; however, the Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn , a from the Yuan Dynasty, is widely regarded as a milestone in the history of Mandarin. In this rhyme book we see many characteristic features of Mandarin, such as the reduction and disappearance of final stop consonants and the reorganization of the Middle Chinese .

Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people living in southern China spoke only their local language. Beijing Mandarin became dominant during the officially Manchu-speaking , and from the 17th century onward, the empire established orthoepy academies in an attempt to make local pronunciations conform to the Beijing standard. These attempts, however, had little success.

This situation changed with the widespread introduction of Standard Mandarin as the national language, to be used in education, the media, and formal situations in both the PRC and the ROC . As a result, Standard Mandarin can now be spoken intelligibly as a second language by most younger people in Mainland China and Taiwan, with various regional accents. In Hong Kong and Macau, because of their colonial and linguistic history, the language of education, the media, formal speech and everyday life remains the local Cantonese, although Standard Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.

Name and classification

The term comes from the ''mandarim'' or ''mandar?n'', from / ''m?nt?ri'', from Hindi ''mantrī'', from Sanskrit ''mantrin'' ; it is a translation of the Chinese term ''Guānhuà'' , which literally means the language of the mandarins . The term ''Guānhuà'' is often considered archaic by Chinese speakers of today, though it is often used by linguists as a collective term to refer to all varieties and dialects of Mandarin, not just standard Mandarin. Another term commonly used to refer to all varieties of Mandarin is ''Běifānghuà'' , or the dialect of the North, although this term is used less and less among Chinese linguists in favour of "''Guānhuà''".

Standard Mandarin

From an official point of view, there are two versions of Standard Mandarin, since the refers to that on the Mainland as ''Putonghua'', whereas the refers to their official language as ''Kuo-yü'' .

Technically, both Putonghua and Guoyu base their phonology on the Beijing accent, though Putonghua also takes some elements from other sources. Comparison of dictionaries produced in the two areas will show that there are few substantial differences. However, both versions of ‘school’ Standard Mandarin are often quite different from the Mandarin dialects that are spoken in accordance with regional habits, and neither is wholly identical to the Beijing dialect. Putonghua and Guoyu also differ from the Beijing dialect in vocabulary, grammar, and usage.

It is important to note that the terms ‘Putonghua ’ and ‘Guoyu’ refer to speech, and hence the difference in the use of and is not usually considered to be a difference between these two concepts.

Dialects

There are regional variations in Mandarin. This is manifested in two ways:

# The varieties of Mandarin cover a huge area containing nearly a billion people. As a result, there are pronounced regional variations in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. These regional differences are rather more pronounced than the differences in the varieties of found in England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the United States.
# Standard Mandarin has been promoted very actively by the , the , and Singapore as a second language. As a result, those who are not native speakers of Standard Mandarin frequently flavour it with a strong infusion of the sounds of their native tongues.

Dialects of Mandarin can be subdivided into eight categories: , Northeastern Mandarin, Ji Lu Mandarin, Jiao Liao Mandarin, Zhongyuan Mandarin, Lan Yin Mandarin, Southwestern Mandarin, and Jianghuai Mandarin. is sometimes considered the ninth category of Mandarin.

Phonology

:''See for a description of Standard Mandarin phonology and for an overview of the phonologies of Mandarin dialects.''

Unlike Cantonese and Taiwanese which are languages, Mandarin is a language like many western languages including English.

Syllables consist maximally of an initial consonant, a glide, a vowel, a final, and tone. Not every syllable that is possible according to this rule actually exists in Mandarin, as there are rules prohibiting certain phonemes from appearing with others, and in practice there are only a few hundred distinct syllables.

Phonological features that are generally shared by the Mandarin dialects include:
* the palatalization of and alveolar sibilants when they occur before palatal ;
* the disappearance of final and /-m/ ;
* the disappearance of the entering tone and the presence of four tonal categories;
* the presence of retroflex consonants ;
* the historical devoicing of plosives and sibilants.

Vocabulary

There are more polysyllabic words in Mandarin than in all other varieties of Chinese except Shanghainese. This is partly because Mandarin has undergone many more sound changes than have southern varieties of Chinese, and has needed to deal with many more homophones — usually by forming new words via compounding, or by adding affixes such as ''lao-'' , ''-zi'' , ''-r'' , and ''-tou'' . There are also a small number of words that have been polysyllabic since Old Chinese, such as ''húdié'' .

The singular pronouns in Mandarin are wǒ ‘I’, nǐ ‘you’, nín ‘you ’, and tā ‘he/she/it’, with -men added for the plural. Further, there is a distinction between the plural first-person pronoun zánmen , which is inclusive of the listener, and wǒmen , which may be exclusive of the listener. Dialects of Mandarin agree with each other quite consistently on these pronouns, but not with other varieties of Chinese .

Other morphemes that Mandarin dialects tend to share are aspect and mood particles, such as ''-le'' , ''-zhe'' , and ''-guo'' . Other Chinese varieties tend to use different words in some of these contexts .
Because of contact with Mongolian and Manchurian peoples, Mandarin has some loanwords from Tungusic languages not present in other varieties of Chinese, such as ‘alley.’ varieties have borrowed from , , and languages.

Writing system

The writing system for almost all the varieties of Chinese is based on a set of written symbols that has been passed down with little change for more than two thousand years. Each of these varieties of Chinese has developed some new words during this time, words for which there are no matching characters in the original set. While it is of course possible to invent new characters , a more common course of development has been to borrow old characters that have fallen into disuse on the basis of their pronunciations. Chinese Characters are traditionally read from Left to Right.

In the original set of characters and definitions there were the ‘this’ and ‘that’ . But these terms were rare in spoken Mandarin, where ‘zhè’ and ‘nà’ were used instead. There are no components in the original set that have those meanings associated with those pronunciations, so a word pronounced ‘zhè’ was borrowed to write ‘this,’ and a word pronounced ‘nà’ was borrowed to write ‘that.’ Originally, 這 meant ‘to go forward to meet someone’, and 那 was the name of a country .

As with other varieties of Chinese, the government of the People's Republic of China has put a set of simplified forms into operation. Under this system, the forms of the words ‘here’ and ‘there’ changed from 這裡 and 那裡 to 这里 and 那里.

Mandarin literature

Originally, written Chinese was learned and composed as a special language. It may originally have rather closely represented the way people spoke, but with time the spoken and written languages diverged rather strongly. The written language, called ‘classical Chinese’ or ‘literary Chinese,’ is much more concise than spoken Chinese, the main reason being that a single written character is often just what one wants to communicate yet its single syllable would not communicate an unambiguous meaning if spoken because of the huge number of homonyms. For instance, 翼 is unambiguous in written Chinese but would be lost among its more than 75 homonyms in spoken Chinese.

For writing formal histories, for writing government documents, and even for writing poetry and fiction, the written language was adequate and economical of both printing resources and the human effort of writing things down. But to record materials that were meant to be reproduced in oral presentations, materials such as plays and grist for the professional story-teller's mill, the classical written language was not appropriate. Even written records of the words of a famous teacher like Zhu Xi tend strongly to reflect his spoken language. From at least the Yuan dynasty, plays that recounted the subversive tales of China's Robin Hoods to the Ming dynasty novels, such as ''Shuihu Zhuan'' , on down to the Qing dynasty novel ''Honglou Meng'' and beyond, there developed a vernacular Chinese literature . In many cases this written language reflected the Mandarin spoken language, 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.

A pivotal character during the first half of the twentieth century, Hu Shi（胡适）, wrote an influential and perceptive study of this literary tradition, entitled ''Báihuà Wénxuéshǐ'' .