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'' .
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