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Mandarin (linguistics)

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This article is on all of the Northern Chinese dialects. For the standardized official spoken Chinese language (Putonghua/Guoyu), see Standard Mandarin.

Mandarin, or Beifanghua (}}}; }}}; literally "Northern Dialect(s)"), or Guanhua (; ; ; literally "official speech") is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. When taken as a separate language, as is often done in academic literature, the Mandarin dialects have more speakers than any other language.

In English, Mandarin can refer to two distinct concepts:

In everyday use, "Mandarin" refers usually to just Standard Mandarin (Putonghua/Guoyu). The broader group of Mandarin dialects consists of diverse 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 Mandarin will describe the variant that they are speaking, for example Sichuan dialect or Northeast China dialect, 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; instead, there are strong regional identities centered around individual Mandarin dialects, due to the wide geographical distribution of its speakers.

This article will focus on the wider sense of Mandarin — a large grouping of diverse northern and southwestern Chinese dialects, rather than just Standard Mandarin.

Like all other varieties of Chinese, 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.

Contents

History

The present main divisions of the Chinese language developed out of Old 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 Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn (中原音韵), a rime book from the Yuan Dynasty, is widely regarded as an important milestone in the history of Mandarin. In this rime 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.

Mandarin_sub-dialects.png
[Uncropped version]

Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese living in southern China spoke only their local language. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese languages, Beijingese Mandarin became dominant at least during the officially Manchu-speaking Qing Empire. Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up Orthoepy Academies (Simplified Chinese: }}}; Traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: ) in an attempt to make pronunciation conform to the Beijing standard. But these attempts 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, but not in Hong Kong. As a result, Standard Mandarin is now spoken fluently by most people in Mainland China and Taiwan, along with numerous regional/local dialects. In Hong Kong and Macau, due to its colonial and linguistic history, the language of education, the media, formal speech and everyday life remains the local Cantonese but Standard Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.

Name and classification

The English term comes from the Portuguese mandarim (from Malay menteri [link] from Sanskrit mantrin-, meaning minister); it is a translation of the Chinese term Guānhuà (Traditional Chinese: ; Simplified Chinese: }}}), 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 (Simplified Chinese: }}}; Traditional Chinese: ), or the dialect(s) of the North.

Standard Mandarin

From an official point of view, there are two versions of Standard 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" Standard Mandarin are often quite different from the Mandarin dialects that are 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.

Dialects

Geographical distribution of Mandarin and other Chinese languages.
Enlarge
Geographical distribution of Mandarin and other Chinese languages.

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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
Mandarin, like most Chinese dialects/languages, is syllable timed, as opposed to many Western languages, including English, which are stress timed.

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 final consonant (which is either an offglide or /n/), plus tone." Not every syllable that is possible according to this rule actually exists in Mandarin, and in practice there are only a few hundred syllables. For example, Mandarin lacks a final 'm' sound. People with a heavy Mandarin accent would often read 'time' as 'tie-mm', or may even pronounce the 'm' more like 'n.'

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, -(e)r, and -tou. There are also a small number of words that have been polysyllabic since Old Chinese, such as hudie (butterfly).

The pronouns in Mandarin are wǒ (我) "I", nǐ (你) "you", and tā (他/她) "he/she", with -men (们) added for the group. Dialects of Mandarin agree with each other quite consistently on this, but not with other varieties of Chinese (e.g. Shanghainese has 侬 non "you" and 伊 yi "he/she").

In addition, there is zánmen (咱们), a "we" that includes the listener, and nín (您), a deferential way of saying "you". A comparable example would be Sie and du in German; see T-V distinction for information about the phenomenon in general.

Other morphemes that Mandarin dialects 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 咗 and 緊).

Due to contact with Central Asian cultures, Mandarin has some loanwords from Altaic languages not present in other varieties of Chinese, for example hútong (胡同) "alley". Southern Chinese varieties have borrowed more from Tai or Austronesian languages.

References

See also

External links

  1. redirect

Chinese: spoken varieties  
Categories: Gan | Hakka | Hui | Jin | Mandarin | Min | Ping | Xiang | Wu | Cantonese
Danzhouhua | Shaozhou Tuhua
Subcategories of Min: Min Bei | Min Dong | Min Nan | Min Zhong | Puxian | Qiongwen | Shaojiang
Subcategories of Mandarin: Northeastern | Beijing | Ji-Lu | Jiao-Liao | Zhongyuan | Lan-Yin | Southwestern | Jianghuai | Dungan
Note: The above is only one classification scheme among many.
The categories in italics are not universally acknowledged to be independent categories.
Comprehensive list of Chinese dialects
Official spoken varieties: Standard Mandarin | Standard Cantonese
Historical phonology: Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Proto-Min | Proto-Mandarin | Haner
Chinese: written varieties
Official written varieties: Classical Chinese | Vernacular Chinese
Other varieties: Written Vernacular Cantonese

 

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