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Standard Chinese is a standard form of Mandarin Chinese with de facto official status in China, Taiwan, and Singapore.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(October 2007) |
Standard Chinese is a standard form of Mandarin Chinese with de facto official status in China, Taiwan, and Singapore.
The Chinese language has always consisted of a wide variety of dialects; hence prestige dialects and linguae francae have always been needed. Confucius (c. 551 – c. 479 BC) referred to yayan 'elegant speech' modeled on the dialect of the Zhou dynasty royal lands rather than regional dialects; texts authored during the Han dynasty (202 BC –220 AD) also refer to tongyu (通語 'common language'). Rime dictionaries written since the Southern and Northern dynasties (420–589) likely also reflected systems of standard pronunciation. However, these standard dialects were largely unknown outside of the educated elite; even among the elite, pronunciations may have differed widely; this was enabled by the unifying factor of Literary Chinese as a written standard regardless of the dialect spoken.
The language of the literate ruling class was known as yayan (Zhou), tongyu (Han dynasty), and guanyun (Sui, Tang and Song dynasties), and mastery of these linguistic standards were necessary for upward advancement. [1] Yuan dynasty North China developed a lingua franca known as han'er yuyan. Yuan era scholar Zhou Deqing published a book detailing a standard spoken Chinese, named Zhongyuan Yayin (Elegant pronunciation of the Central Plains), meant to represent the common spoken language rather than the "correct" literary pronunciation reflected in the Song dictionaries. This book became the standard speech of northern Chinese theatre forms. [2] During the flight of the Song literati to the South after the Jurchen conquest, Neo-Confucians began to fixate on the idea of restoring "correct" pronunciation as it was believed to be spoken by the ancients. As a result, the subsequent rime dictionaries such as the Ming dynasty's Hongwu Zhengyun 洪武正韵 reflect the "ideal" pronunciations and deviated from the actual spoken pronunciations. This deviation differed from the Yuan dynasty's Zhongyuan Yayin which more closely reflected contemporary speech. [3] Ming scholar Lu Kun criticised the Hongwu Zhengyun as too distant from the "elegant pronunciation of middle China" and was not actually spoken by court officials. [2]
The Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1644–1912) began to use the term Guanhua (官話) 'official speech' to refer to the dialect used at the courts. It seems that during the early part of this period, the standard was based on the Nanjing dialect, but later the Beijing dialect became increasingly influential, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various dialects in the capital, Beijing.
Historically, the word "Mandarin" refers to the language spoken by the upper classes of 19th-century Beijing, as well as by the higher civil servants and military officers of the imperial regime serving throughout the country. This lect is quite close to modern Mandarin, but there exist some differences. The Mandarin language used many honorifics which have mostly disappeared in modern-day Mandarin daily speech, such as jian (賤 '[my] humble') and guì (貴 '[your] honorable').The grammar of the earlier form of Mandarin grammar was almost identical to that in contemporary Mandarin, with infrequent, minor differences in the usage of grammatical particular or word order in the sentence. Its vocabulary was also largely the same as in modern Mandarin, though some vocabulary has since been dropped from the language.
The existence of Guanhua was already known to Europeans by the time of Matteo Ricci, who worked in China from 1582 to 1610. Ricci wrote of "a spoken language common to the whole Empire, known as the Quonhua, an official language for civil and forensic use". [4]
In the 17th century, the Qing had set up orthoepy academies (正音書院; Zhèngyīn shūyuàn) in an attempt to make pronunciation conform to the Beijing standard. But these attempts had little success. As late as the 19th century the emperor had difficulty understanding some of his own ministers in court, who did not always try to follow any standard pronunciation. As late as the early 20th century, the position of Nanjing Mandarin was considered higher than that of Beijing by some and the postal romanization standard set in 1906 included spellings with elements of Nanjing pronunciation. [5] The sense of Guoyu as a specific language variety promoted for general use by the citizenry was originally borrowed from Japan; in 1902 the Japanese Diet had formed the National Language Research Council to standardize a form of the Japanese language dubbed kokugo (国語). [6] Reformers in the Qing bureaucracy took inspiration and borrowed the term into Chinese, and in 1909 the Qing education ministry officially proclaimed imperial Mandarin as Guoyu (国语; 國語), the 'national language'.
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After the Republic of China was established in 1912, there was more success in promoting a common national language. A Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation was convened with delegates from the entire country, who were chosen based as often on political considerations as often as on linguistic expertise. The conference deadlocked between promoters of northern and southern pronunciation standards and as a result, a compromise was produced. The Dictionary of National Pronunciation (國音詞典) was published, which attempted compromise between Beijingese and other regional dialects: it preserved the checked tone that had disappeared in Mandarin, as well as some consonantal endings from southern varieties and consonantal onsets from Wu. Ultimately, this attempt at synthesis was abandoned in favor of a pronunciation based on the Beijing dialect. [7]
Meanwhile, vernacular literature continued to develop apace, despite the lack of a standardized pronunciation. Gradually, the members of the National Language Commission came to settle upon the Beijing dialect which became the major source of standard national pronunciation, due to the status of that dialect as a prestigious dialect. In 1932, the commission published the Vocabulary of National Pronunciation for Everyday Use (國音常用字彙), with little fanfare or official pronunciation. This dictionary was similar to the previous published one, now known as the Old National Pronunciation , except that it normalized the pronunciations for all characters into the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect. Despite efforts by some factions to recognize and promote southern Chinese varieties as well, the Kuomintang strongly promoted Guoyu as the one national language and censored and arrested opponents of this movement, continuing this through the wartime years. Elements from other dialects continue to exist in the standard language, but as exceptions rather than the rule. [8]
The government of the People's Republic of China, established in 1949, continued the effort. In 1955, Guoyu was renamed Putonghua (普通話 'common speech'. The Republic of China on Taiwan continues to refer to Standard Chinese as Guoyu. Since then, the standards used in mainland China and Taiwan have diverged somewhat, though they continue to remain essentially identical.
After the handovers of Hong Kong and Macau, the term Putonghua is used in the special administrative regions of China and pinyin is widely used for teaching of Putonghua.
In both mainland China and Taiwan, the use of Mandarin as the medium of instruction in the educational system and in the media has contributed to the spread of Mandarin. As a result, Standard Chinese is now spoken fluently by most people in mainland China and in Taiwan. However, in Hong Kong and Macau, due to historical and linguistic reasons, the language of education and both formal and informal speech remains Cantonese despite the growing use of Standard Chinese.
Chinese is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China. Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language.
Mandarin is a group of Chinese language dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China and Taiwan. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of China and Taiwan. Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as Northern Chinese. Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the standard language. Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers.
Standard Chinese is a modern standard form of Mandarin Chinese that was first codified during the republican era (1912–1949). It is designated as the official language of mainland China and a major language in the United Nations, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is largely based on the Beijing dialect. Standard Chinese is a pluricentric language with local standards in mainland China, Taiwan and Singapore that mainly differ in their lexicon. Hong Kong written Chinese, used for formal written communication in Hong Kong and Macau, is a form of Standard Chinese that is read aloud with the Cantonese reading of characters.
Written vernacular Chinese, also known as baihua, comprises forms of written Chinese based on the vernacular varieties of the language spoken throughout China. It is contrasted with Literary Chinese, which was the predominant written form of the language in imperial China until the early 20th century.
There are hundreds of local Chinese language varieties forming a branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family, many of which are not mutually intelligible. Variation is particularly strong in the more mountainous southeast part of mainland China. The varieties are typically classified into several groups: Mandarin, Wu, Min, Xiang, Gan, Jin, Hakka and Yue, though some varieties remain unclassified. These groups are neither clades nor individual languages defined by mutual intelligibility, but reflect common phonological developments from Middle Chinese.
Postal romanization was a system of transliterating place names in China developed by postal authorities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For many cities, the corresponding postal romanization was the most common English-language form of the city's name from the 1890s until the 1980s, when postal romanization was replaced by pinyin, but the system remained in place on Taiwan until 2002.
The Beijing dialect, also known as Pekingese and Beijingese, is the prestige dialect of Mandarin spoken in the urban area of Beijing, China. It is the phonological basis of Standard Chinese, the official language in the People's Republic of China and one of the official languages of Singapore and the Republic of China. Despite the similarity to Standard Chinese, it is characterized by some "iconic" differences, including the addition of a final rhotic 儿; -r to some words. During the Ming, southern dialectal influences were also introduced into the dialect.
A mandarin was a bureaucrat scholar in the history of China, Korea and Vietnam.
Taiwanese Mandarin, frequently referred to as Guoyu or Huayu, is the variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken in Taiwan. A large majority of the Taiwanese population is fluent in Mandarin, though many also speak a variety of Min Chinese known as Taiwanese Hokkien, which has had a significant influence on the Mandarin spoken on the island.
Sichuanese, also called Sichuanese Mandarin, is a branch of Southwestern Mandarin spoken mainly in Sichuan and Chongqing, which was part of Sichuan Province until 1997, and the adjacent regions of their neighboring provinces, such as Hubei, Guizhou, Yunnan, Hunan and Shaanxi. Although "Sichuanese" is often synonymous with the Chengdu-Chongqing dialect, there is still a great amount of diversity among the Sichuanese dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible with each other. In addition, because Sichuanese is the lingua franca in Sichuan, Chongqing and part of Tibet, it is also used by many Tibetan, Yi, Qiang and other ethnic minority groups as a second language.
Southwestern Mandarin, also known as Upper Yangtze Mandarin, is a Mandarin Chinese dialect spoken in much of Southwestern China, including in Sichuan, Yunnan, Chongqing, Guizhou, most parts of Hubei, the northwestern part of Hunan, the northern part of Guangxi and some southern parts of Shaanxi and Gansu.
The earliest historical linguistic evidence of the spoken Chinese language dates back approximately 4500 years, while examples of the writing system that would become written Chinese are attested in a body of inscriptions made on bronze vessels and oracle bones during the Late Shang period, with the very oldest dated to c. 1200 BCE.
Singaporean Mandarin is a variety of Mandarin Chinese spoken natively in Singapore. Mandarin is one of the four official languages of Singapore along with English, Malay and Tamil.
Zhongyuan (Chinese: 中原; pinyin: Zhōngyuán), the Central Plain(s), also known as Zhongtu (Chinese: 中土; pinyin: Zhōngtǔ, lit. 'central land') and Zhongzhou (Chinese: 中州; pinyin: Zhōngzhōu, lit. 'central region'), commonly refers to the part of the North China Plain surrounding the lower and middle reaches of the Yellow River, centered on the region between Luoyang and Kaifeng. It has been perceived as the birthplace of the Chinese civilization. Historically, the Huaxia people viewed Zhongyuan as 'the center of the world'. Human activities in the Zhongyuan region can be traced back to the Palaeolithic period.
Differing literary and colloquial readings for certain Chinese characters are a common feature of many Chinese varieties, and the reading distinctions for these linguistic doublets often typify a dialect group. Literary readings are usually used in loanwords, geographic and personal names, literary works such as poetry, and in formal contexts, while colloquial readings are used in everyday vernacular speech.
Old Mandarin or Early Mandarin was the speech of northern China during the Jurchen-ruled Jin dynasty and the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. New genres of vernacular literature were based on this language, including verse, drama and story forms, such as the qu and sanqu.
Lower Yangtze Mandarin is one of the most divergent and least mutually-intelligible of the Mandarin languages, as it neighbours the Wu, Hui, and Gan groups of Sinitic languages. It is also known as Jiang–Huai Mandarin, named after the Yangtze (Jiang) and Huai Rivers. Lower Yangtze is distinguished from most other Mandarin varieties by the retention of a final glottal stop in words that ended in a stop consonant in Middle Chinese.
The Nanjing dialect, also known as Nankinese, Nankingese, Nanjingese, Nanjingnese and Nanjing Mandarin, is the prestige dialect of Mandarin spoken in the urban area of Nanjing, China. It is part of the Jianghuai group of Chinese varieties.
Mandarin was the common spoken language of administration of the Chinese empire during the Ming and Qing dynasties. It arose as a practical measure, due to the mutual unintelligibility of the varieties of Chinese spoken in different parts of China. Knowledge of this language was thus essential for an official career, but it was never formally defined. The language was a koiné based on Mandarin dialects. The southern variant spoken around Nanjing was prevalent in the late Ming and early Qing eras, but a form based on the Beijing dialect became dominant by the mid-19th century and developed into Standard Chinese in the 20th century. In some 19th-century works, it was called the court dialect.
Yayan is a theorized ancient form of the Chinese language used as a standard dialect by intellectuals during the Zhou dynasty.
Præter hunc tamen cuique Provinciæ vernaculum sermonem, alius est universo regno communis, quem ipsi Quonhua vocant, quod curialem vel forensem sonat.