Mandarin (linguistics)
Mandarin is the official language of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China on Taiwan (ROC). It is also one of four official languages in Singapore. The efforts of both the PRC and ROC to promote Mandarin as the standard language of communication has made it the most widely-spoken dialect of the Chinese language. In fact, there are more speakers of Mandarin than of any other language.
The standard form of Mandarin Chinese uses the sounds of Beijing but there are regional variations in pronunciation. Nevertheless, Mandarin is also sometimes incorrectly known as Beijingese (Beijing hua or the Beijing dialect, Beijing fangyan).
Name
The English term comes from the Chinese term Guanhua (官話), which literally means the language of the mandarins (imperial magistrates), although this term is considered archaic in Chinese. In the PRC, the language is known as Putonghua (普通話, "the common language") or Han yu (漢語, the language of the Han). On Taiwan, the language is officially known as Guoyu (國語,"the national language"). Among overseas Chinese communities, particularly in South East Asia, the language is known as Huayu (華語 "the Chinese language")
History
Most Chinese living in northern China and in Sichuan use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The prevalence of 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 Sichuan is largely due to a plague in the 12th century. This plague, which may have been related to the black death, depopulated the area, leading to later settlement from north China.
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.
From an unofficial point of view, things are more complicated. Most Chinese, including the Chinese political leaders themselves, do not speak Mandarin with a Beijingese accent, and there are many local variations of Mandarin. In northern China and Sichuan, these local variations predated the era of mass education in Mandarin. In the south, the interaction between Mandarin and local dialects has produced combinations such as Taiwanese 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.
Ever since the first Westerners entered China and attempted to learn Mandarin,
the need for some kind of phonetic transcription system to record the pronunciation of Chinese characters became apparent. Over the years, many such systems have been proposed. The first to be widely accepted was the Wade-Giles system, named after its 19th century inventors. This system is still in use today, though not in China.
In the 20th century, Chinese linguists proposed various transcription systems, one of which even introduced a whole new syllabic alphabet: the Bopomofo system. The most successful of these transcription systems was Pinyin, which was accepted as the official transcription system for Mandarin by the PRC in 1958 and later also by the United Nations and other international organizations. The ROC has not adopted it for political reasons. Today, schools in the PRC teach Pinyin. There even were plans for Pinyin to supersede the Chinese characters. These plans, however, proved to be impractical. (See Chinese language)
Other less successful Romanizations include:
Mandarin, like all Chinese dialects, is a tonal language. A syllable can be left toneless or pronounced in one of four pitches. These changes in tone
also change meaning. The four different pitches are:
Pronunciation also varies with context according to the rules of tone sandhi.
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 'tyne'. The implications of this are discussed in the Chinese language article as are the main features of Chinese (and hence Mandarin) grammar.
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 translated into "delüfeng" in the 1920s, but later it was changed to the more harmonious "dianhua", which is a word derived from Japanese hanzi. On the other hand, the word for "microphone" remains "maikefeng". Because of the close relationship between written Chinese and Japanese hanzi, Mandarin borrowed many Japanese words that had originally been derived from European words in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
Because of these transcription difficulties, 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 Mandarin word for "beer" is "pi2 jiu3" (啤酒 for pronunciation issues see the Pinyin page). The first syllable ("pi" 啤) is a phonetic rendering, whereas the second syllable (酒) is the Mandarin word for "alcoholic beverage".
Since this way of incorporating foreign words is very cumbersome, the Chinese tend to invent their own words for technical innovations (the word for "train" (火車), e.g., means "fire vehicle"); so the international set of technical expressions deriving from Latin and Greek is not found in Mandarin.
To the dismay of non-Mandarin speakers, the predominant role of Mandarin has led to the misidentification of Mandarin as "the Chinese language". Although both the PRC and the ROC use Mandarin as the official language and promote its nationwide use, Mandarin
is still far from supplanting the local dialects that are in daily use in many parts of China,
especially in the southern provinces of the PRC. Many Chinese language speakers in mainland China do not speak Mandarin very well.
In the predominantly Han areas within the People's Republic of China, the interaction between Mandarin and the local Chinese dialects has generally not been controversial. Although the use of Mandarin is encouraged as the common working language, the PRC has attempted to be sensitive to the status of local dialects and has not discouraged their use.
In the Republic of China, the relationship between Mandarin and local dialects, particularly Taiwanese has been more heated. Until the 1980s the government attempted to discourage the use of Taiwanese, even portraying it as inferior.Mandarin and Beijingese
One common misconception is that Mandarin is the same as "Beijing dialect". It is true that the standard pronunciation and grammar of Mandarin are based on the Beijing dialect, but "standard Mandarin" is a rather elusive concept. In any case, Mandarin spoken outside of Beijing differs from Beijingese in a number of important respects: residents of Beijing tend to make very heavy use of retroflex suffixes, and there are many difference in vocabulary.Variations
From an official point of view, there are two Mandarins, since the Beijing government refers to that on the Mainland Putonghua, or "Common Language", whereas the Taipei government refers to their official language as Kuo-yü, or "National Language". However, these two Mandarins are mutually intelligible and have not yet evolved into separate languages.Transcription systems
Pronunciation and Grammar
(See also Pinyin#Tones.)Adoption of Foreign Words
Mandarin Chinese and other dialects
