Mandarin
官話/官话 Guānhuà
Guānhuà (Mandarin) written in Chinese characters
Spoken in	Most of northern and southwestern China (see also Standard Chinese)
Native speakers	845 million  (2000 census)[1] Total: 1,020 million
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese Mandarin
Dialects	Northeastern Beijing Ji-Lu Jiao-Liao Lower Yangtze Central Plains Lan-Yin Southwestern Jin (disputed)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	cmn
Linguasphere	79-AAA-b
Mandarin area, with disputed Jin group in light green
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In Chinese linguistics, Mandarin (simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話; pinyin: Guānhuà; literally "speech of officials") refers to a group of related varieties or dialects spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. Because most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is also referred to, particularly among Chinese speakers, as the "northern dialect(s)" (simplified Chinese: 北方话; traditional Chinese: 北方 話; pinyin: Běifānghuà). A northeastern-dialect speaker and a southwestern-dialect speaker can hardly communicate except through the standard language, mainly because of the differences in tone. Nonetheless, the variation within Mandarin is less significant than the much greater variation found within several other varieties of Chinese, and this is thought to be due to a relatively recent spread of Mandarin across China, combined with a greater ease of travel and communication compared to the more mountainous south of China.

Mandarin dialects, particularly the Beijing dialect, form the basis of Standard Chinese, which is also referred to "Mandarin" (also referred to as Putonghua (simplified Chinese: 普通话; traditional Chinese: 普通話; pinyin: Pǔtōnghuà; literally "common speech") or Guoyu (Chinese: 國語; pinyin: Guóyǔ; literally "national language")). Standard Chinese or Standard Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China and one of the four official languages of Singapore. When the Mandarin group is taken as one language, as is often done in academic literature, it has more native speakers (nearly a billion) than does any other language. For most of Chinese history, the capital has been within the Mandarin area, making these dialects very influential. Since the early 20th century, a form of standardized Mandarin (described above) has been the official and de facto national standard language in China and it is today one of the most frequently used varieties of Chinese among Chinese diaspora communities internationally.

Name[link]

The English word "mandarin" (from Portuguese mandarim, from Malay [ˈməntəri] menteri, from Hindi mantri, from Sanskrit mantrin, meaning "minister or counsellor"), originally meant an official of the Chinese empire.^[2][3] As their home dialects were varied and often mutually unintelligible, these officials communicated using a koiné based on various northern dialects. When Jesuit missionaries learned this standard language in the 16th century, they called it Mandarin, from its Chinese name Guānhuà (官话/官話), or "language of the officials".^[4]

In everyday English, "Mandarin" refers to Standard Chinese, which is often called simply "Chinese". Standard Chinese is based on the particular Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing, with some lexical and syntactic influence from other Mandarin dialects. It is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the official language of the Republic of China (R.O.C./Taiwan), and one of the four official languages of the Republic of Singapore. It also functions as the language of instruction in the PRC and in 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 Pǔtōnghuà 普通话 (on the mainland), Guóyǔ 國語 (in Taiwan) or Huáyǔ 华语 (in Malaysia and Singapore), but not as Guānhuà.^[5]

This article uses the term "Mandarin" in the sense used by linguists, referring to the diverse group of Mandarin dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China, which Chinese linguists call Guānhuà. The alternative term Běifānghuà (simplified Chinese: 北方话; traditional Chinese: 北方話), or "Northern dialect(s)", is used less and less among Chinese linguists. By extension, the term "Old 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" (or so-called "Northern dialects") in a broader sense. Within Chinese social or cultural discourse, there is not 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 their speakers. Speakers of forms of Mandarin other than the standard typically refer to the variety they speak by a geographic name—for example Sichuan dialect, Hebei dialect or Northeastern dialect, all being regarded as distinct from the standard language.

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

History[link]

The present Chinese language varieties developed out of the different ways in which dialects of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese evolved. Traditionally, seven major groups of dialects have been recognized. Aside from Mandarin, the other six are Wu Chinese, Hakka Chinese, Min Chinese, Xiang Chinese, Yue Chinese and Gan Chinese.^[6] More recently, other more specific groups have been recognized.

Old Mandarin[link]

A page of the Menggu Ziyun, covering the syllables tsim to lim

After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty, and during the reign of the Jin (Jurchen) and Yuan (Mongol) dynasties in northern China, a common 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.^[7]

The rhyming conventions of the new verse were codified in a rhyme dictionary called the Zhongyuan Yinyun (1324). A radical departure from the rhyme 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 rhyme dictionary based on 'Phags-pa. The rhyme 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.^[7]

In Middle Chinese, initial plosives and affricates showed a three-way contrast between tenuis, voiceless aspirated and voiced consonants. There were four tones, with the fourth, or "entering tone", comprising syllables ending in plosives (-p, -t or -k). 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 dialects except the Wu group, this distinction became phonemic, and the system of initials and tones was rearranged differently in each of the major groups.^[8]

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 (though their different origin is marked in the dictionary). 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 (rendered j-, q- and x- in pinyin).^[7]

The flourishing vernacular literature of the period also shows distinctively Mandarin vocabulary and syntax, though some, such as the third-person pronoun tā (他), can be traced back to the Tang Dynasty.^[9]

Vernacular literature[link]

Until the early 20th century, formal writing and even much poetry and fiction was done in Literary Chinese, which was modelled on the classics of the Warring States period and 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 instance, 翼 (yì, wing) is unambiguous in written Chinese, but has over 75 homophones in spoken Mandarin.

The literary language was less appropriate for recording materials that were meant to be reproduced in oral presentations, materials such as plays and grist for the professional story-teller's mill. 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 (白話/白话; báihuà). 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.^[10]

Hu Shih, a pivotal figure of the first half of the twentieth century, wrote an influential and perceptive study of this literary tradition, entitled Báihuà Wénxuéshǐ (A History of Vernacular Literature).

Koiné of the Late Empire[link]

Zhongguo Guanhua (中國官話), or Medii Regni Communis Loquela ("Middle Kingdom's Common Speech"), used on the frontispiece of an early Chinese grammar published by Étienne Fourmont (with Arcadio Huang) in 1742^[11]