- This article is on all of the Northern Chinese dialects. For the standardized official spoken Chinese language (Putonghua/ Guoyu), see Standard Mandarin.
Mandarin (Traditional: 北方話, Simplified: 北方话, Hanyu Pinyin: Běifānghuà, lit. "Northern speech" OR 北方方言 Hanyu Pinyin: Běifāng Fāngyán, lit. "Northern dialects"), is a category of Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. The term "Mandarin" can also refer to Standard Mandarin, which is based on the Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing. Standard Mandarin is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and one of the official spoken languages of Singapore. When taken as an independent language, as is often done in academic literature, Mandarin has more speakers than any other language.
"Mandarin" usually refers to only standard Mandarin in everyday usage. The broad academic concept of "Mandarin" encompasses a large number of linguistically related dialects, some less mutually intelligible than others, and is very rarely 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 Mandarin will describe the variant that they are speaking, for example Sichuan dialect or Northeast China dialect, and may not recognize that it is in fact classified by linguists as a form of "Mandarin". Nor is there a common "Mandarin" identity based on language, though there are strong regional identities centered around individual Mandarin dialects.
Like all other varieties of Chinese, there is plenty of dispute as to whether Mandarin is a language or a dialect. Please see here for the issues surrounding this dispute.
History The present main divisions of the Chinese language developed out of Archaic Chinese and Middle Chinese.
Most Chinese living in a broad arc, from the north-east (Manchuria) to the south-west (Yunnan), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The prevalence of linguistic homogeneity (i.e. Mandarin) throughout northern China is largely the result of geography, namely the plains of north China. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China have promoted linguistic diversity. The presence of Mandarin in southwest China is largely due to a plague in the 12th century in Sichuan. This plague, which may have been related to the black death, depopulated the area, leading to later settlement from north China.
There is no clear dividing line where Middle Chinese ends and Mandarin begins; however, the Zhongyuan Yinyun (中原音韵), a rhyme book from the Yuan Dynasty, is widely regarded as an important 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 tones.
Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese living in southern China did not speak any Mandarin. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese dialects, Beijingese Mandarin became dominant at least during the officially Manchu-speaking Qing Empire. Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up Orthoepy Academies (正音書院 Zhengyin Shuyuan) in an attempt to make pronunciation conform to the Beijing standard. But these attempts had little success.
This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC) of an elementary school education system committed to teaching Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken fluently by most people in Mainland China and in Taiwan. In Hong Kong, the language of education and formal speech remains Cantonese but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.
Name and classification The English term comes from the Portuguese mandarim (from Malay menteri [2] (http://www.bartleby.com/61/33/M0073300.html)[3] (http://dictionary.bhanot.net/index.html) from Sanskrit mantrin-, meaning minister; in Chinese 满大人); it is a translation of the Chinese term Guānhuà (官話; simplified: 官话), which literally means the language of the mandarins (imperial magistrates). The term Guānhuà is often considered archaic by Chinese speakers of today, though it is used sometimes 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 (北方話, simplified: 北方话), or the dialect(s) of the North.
The following Mandarin recording is a faithful translation of the Taiwanese recording (which was made first). They both mean, "Today that girl came to our home to see me." To help focus on what is being said and how they differ, here are the word-by-word English equivalents, a Taiwanese POJ transliteration, a rather imperfect rendering of the spoken Taiwanese into an informal transliteration, the same style of transliteration of the spoken Mandarin, and the pinyin version of the Mandarin:
| 1 | Today | that | girl | comes-to | our | home | (to) | see | me | | | 2 | Kin-á-jit | hit-ê | cha-bóu gín-á | lâi | góan | tau | | khòaⁿ | góa. | listen | | 3 | Gin-na-jit | hill-lay | dza-bo-gee-nah | lai | gwon | dow | | kwoa | ngwah. | | 4 | Jin-tien | nay-guh | nyu-hi-dz | dow | dza-mun | jia | lie | khan | woh. | listen | | 5 | Jīntiān | nèige | nǚháizi | dào | zánmen | jiā | lái | kàn | wǒ. | - English
- Taiwanese POJ
- Informal Taiwanese transliteration
- Informal Mandarin transliteration
- Mandarin Pinyin
Standardized Mandarin Main article: Standard Mandarin
From an official point of view, there are two versions of standardized spoken Mandarin, since the Beijing government refers to that on the Mainland as Putonghua, whereas the Taipei government refers to their official language as Kuo-yü (Guoyu in pinyin).
Technically, both Putonghua and Guoyu base their phonology on the Beijing dialect, 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" Mandarin are often quite different from the Mandarin that is spoken in accordance with regional habits, and neither is identical to even 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 simplified characters and traditional characters is not usually considered to be a difference between these two concepts.
Variations  Geographical distribution of Mandarin and other Chinese languages. Main article: Dialects of Mandarin
There are regional variations in Mandarin. 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 (or more so than) the regional versions of the English language found in England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the United States.
- Standard Mandarin has been promoted very actively by the PRC, the ROC, 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.
Dialects of Mandarin can be subdivided into eight categories: Beijing Mandarin, Northeastern Mandarin, Ji Lu Mandarin, Jiao Liao Mandarin, Zhongyuan Mandarin, Lan Yin Mandarin, Southwestern Mandarin, and Jianghuai Mandarin. Jin is sometimes considered the ninth category of Mandarin (others separate it from Mandarin altogether).
In both Mainland China and Taiwan, Mandarin in predominantly Han Chinese areas 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.
However, 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.
Phonology See standard Mandarin for a description of Standard Mandarin phonology and dialects of Mandarin for an overview of the phonologies of Mandarin dialects.
The set of syllables in Chinese is very small, since each syllable has to be constructed after the pattern: "optional initial consonant followed by vowel followed by optional nasal". Not every syllable that is possible according to this rule is actually used, and in practice there are only a few hundred syllables. For example, Mandarin totally lacks the ending 'm' sound. People with a heavy Mandarin accent would often read 'time' as 'tie-mm'.
Vocabulary There are many more words in Mandarin with more than one syllable compared to other varieties of Chinese. This is because Mandarin has undergone many more sound changes than southern varieties of Chinese, and needed to deal with many more homophones — usually by forming new words via compounding. This creates words with more than one syllable. (In contrast, Ancient Chinese had almost no words at all with more than one syllable.)
The pronouns in Mandarin are wǒ (我) "I", nǐ (你) "you", and tā (他/她) "he/she", with -men (们) added for the plural. Dialects of Mandarin agree with each other quite consistently on this, but not with other varieties of Chinese. (e.g. Wu has 侬 "you".)
In addition, there is zánmen (咱们), used to refer to a "we" that includes the listener, and nín (您), a deferential way of saying "you".
Other vocabulary that Mandarin dialects generally tend to share are aspect and mood particles, such as -le (了), -zhe (着), and -guo (过). Other Chinese varieties tend to use different words in some of these contexts (e.g. Cantonese's 咗 and 紧).
Due to its relative proximity with Central Asia, Mandarin has some loanwords from Altaic languages, for example, hútong (胡同) "alley". Southern Chinese tends to have more borrowings from Tai or Austronesian languages.
Adoption of foreign words Since Chinese has so few syllables, Mandarin speakers typically experience great difficulty in pronouncing words from languages rich in consonant clusters, e.g. most European languages. Additionally, syllables that do not conform to the Mandarin pattern cannot be directly transcribed into Chinese characters. There is an official system for approximating foreign words using Chinese characters, but this sometimes yields strange results and is mainly used for rendering foreign names.
For example, the word "telephone" was loaned as "delüfeng" in the 1920s, but later it was changed to "dianhua" (电话 "electric speech"). On the other hand, the word for "microphone" remains "maikefeng" (although 话筒 "speech tube" is gradually replacing the purely phonetic rendering). Because of the close relationship between written Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji, Mandarin borrowed many Japanese words that had originally been derived from European words in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
Since this way of incorporating foreign words is very cumbersome, it is more common to coin new words in Mandarin than to borrow foreign words directly. These new words are usually polysyllabic. Often one syllable conveys the word's "subject". (This is similar to the way in which many individual Chinese characters are composed.) For example, the word for "train" (火車) means "fire vehicle". As a consequence, the international set of technical expressions deriving from Latin and Greek is not found in Mandarin.
Characters which are used exclusively in the transcription of foreign words are present (though not prominently so) in Chinese; many of these characters date back to Middle Chinese wherein they were used to translate Sanskrit phonemes.
See also
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