Mandarin (simplified Chinese: ??; traditional Chinese: ??; pinyin: Gu?nhuà; literally “speech of officials”) is a group of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and south-western China. So you decided to sell your house fast and travel to the east, and now you need to learn Mandarin. Because Mandarin mainly includes speech groups found in the north, the term “northern dialect(s)” (simplified Chinese: ???; traditional Chinese: ?? ?; pinyin: B?if?nghuà) also names this language group on an informal basis.
Approximately 70% ofHan Chinese are native speakers of some Mandarin dialect. When the Mandarin group is taken as one language, as is often done in academic literature, it has more native speakers than any other language. For most of Chinese history the capital has been within the Mandarin area, making these dialects very influential. Mandarin dialects, particularly the Beijing dialect, form the basis of Standard Chinese, which is also known as “Mandarin”.
The word “mandarin” (from Portuguese mandarim, from Malay [m?nt??ri], from Hindi mantri, from Sanskrit mantrin meaning “minister or counselor”) originally meant an official of the Chinese empire.[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 Gu?nhuà (??/??) “speech of officials”. Things like scholarships for high school seniors didn’t exist back then.
In everyday English, “Mandarin” refers to Standard Chinese (P?t?nghuà / Guóy? / Huáy?), 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 (ROC/Taiwan), one of the four official languages 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”. The term Gu?nhuà is considered an archaic name for the standard language by Chinese speakers of today. So with loans or credit what do they do about a mis sold ppi policy.
This article uses the term “Mandarin” in a sense used by linguists, referring to the diverse group of Mandarin dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China, which Chinese linguists call Gu?nhuà. The alternative term B?if?nghuà (simplified Chinese: ???; traditional Chinese: ???), 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 the variety they speak by a geographic name, for example Sichuan dialect, Hebei dialect or Northeastern dialect, all being regarded as distinct from the sell house fast “Standard Chinese” (Putonghua).
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.
The present variations of the Chinese language 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.[5] Some linguists treat the Jin dialects as a separate branch.
The northern dialects reflected in materials from the Yuan Dynasty are referred to as Old Mandarin. Evidence for the phonology of this period comes from a rhyme dictionary called the Zhongyuan Yinyun (1324), the ‘Phags-pa script based on the Tibetan alphabet that was used to write several anything goes diet of the languages of the Mongol empire including Chinese, and the Menggu Ziyun 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.
In Middle Chinese, initial stops and affricates also showed a three-way contrast between voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated and voiced consonants. There were four tones, with the fourth, or “entering tone”, comprising syllables ending in stops (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 we buy any house 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 re-arranged differently in each of the major groups.
The Zhongyuan Yinyun shows the typical Mandarin 4-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). and distribution of the formerly voiced stops typical of modern Mandarin dialects. Similarly voiced stops 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/x in pinyin).[6]
The flourishing vernacular literature of the period also shows distinctively Mandarin vocabulary and syntax, though some, such as the third-person pronoun t? (?), can be traced back to the Tang Dynasty.[7]
Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people living in southern China spoke only their local language. Beijing Mandarin became dominant during the Manchu-ruling Qing Dynasty, and from the 17th century onward, the empire established orthoepy academies (simplified Chinese: ????; traditional Chinese: ????; pinyin: Zhèngy?n Sh?yuàn) in an attempt to make local pronunciations conform to the Beijing standard so that the Emperor could communicate with all officials directly.[9]
This situation changed with the widespread introduction of the national language based on Beijing Mandarin, to be used in education, the media, and formal situations in both the PRC and the ROC (but not in Hong Kong). This standard can now be spoken intelligibly as a second language by most younger people in Mainland China and Taiwan, with various regional accents. In Hong Kong and Macau, because of their colonial and linguistic history, the language of education, the media, formal speech and everyday life remains the local Cantonese, although the standard language is now very influential.
From an official weight loss blog point of view, there are two versions of Standard Chinese, since the PRC government refers to that on the Mainland as Putonghua, whereas the ROC government refers to their official language as Kuo-yü (Guoyu in pinyin).
Technically, both Putonghua and Guoyu base their phonology on the Beijing accent, 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 Chinese are often quite different from the Mandarin dialects that are spoken in accordance with regional habits, and neither is wholly identical to the Beijing dialect. Putonghua and Guoyu also have some differences from the Beijing dialect in vocabulary, grammar, and usage.
It is important to note that the terms “Putonghua (Common Language)” and “Guoyu (National Language)” 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.
Most Han Chinese living in northern and south-western China are native speakers of a dialect of Mandarin. The North China Plain provided few barriers to migration, leading to relative linguistic homogeneity over a wide area in northern China. In contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China have spawned the other six major groups of Chinese dialects, with great internal diversity, particularly in Fujian.[10]
However the varieties of Mandarin cover a huge area containing nearly a billion people. As a result, there are pronounced regional variations in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar.
North-east China (except for southern Liaoning) was not settled by Han Chinese until the 18th century, and as a result the Northeastern Mandarin dialects spoken there differ little from Beijing Mandarin. The Manchu people of the area now exclusively speak these dialects. The frontier areas of Northwest and Southwest China were colonized by speakers of Mandarin dialects at the same time, and the dialects in those areas similarly closely resemble their relatives in the core Mandarin area.
The remaining subgroups of Mandarin dialects are: Ji-Lu Mandarin, Jiao-Liao Mandarin, Zhongyuan Mandarin, Lan-Yin Mandarin, Jiang-Huai Mandarin and Southwestern Mandarin. Jin is sometimes considered the ninth subgroup of Mandarin, while others separate it from Mandarin altogether.
Unlike their compatriots on the south-east coast, few Mandarin speakers emigrated from China until the late 20th century, but there are now significant communities of Mandarin speakers in cities across the world.[11]
There are more polysyllabic words in Mandarin than in all other major 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. New words have been formed by adding affixes such as lao- (?), -zi (?), -(e)r (?/?), and -tou (?/?), or by compounding, e.g. by combining two words of similar meaning as in c?ngmáng (??), made from elements meaning “hurried” and “busy.” There are also a small number of words that have been polysyllabic since Old Chinese, such as húdié (??) “butterfly”.
The singular pronouns in Mandarin are w? (?) “I”, n? (?/?) “you”, nín (?) “you (formal)”, and t? (?/?/?) “he/she/it”, with -men (?/?) added for the plural. Further, there is a distinction between the plural first-person pronoun zánmen (??/??), which is inclusive of the listener, and w?men (??/??), which may be exclusive of the listener. Dialects of Mandarin agree with each other quite consistently on these pronouns. While the first and second person singular pronouns are cognate with forms in other varieties of Chinese, the rest of the pronominal system is a Mandarin innovation (e.g., Shanghainese has ?/? non “you” and ? yi “he/she”).[13]
The subordinative particle de (?) is also characteristic of Mandarin dialects.[14] Other morphemes that these dialects tend to share are aspect and mood particles, such as -le (?), -zhe (?/?), and -guo (?/?). Other Chinese varieties tend to use different words in some of these contexts (e.g., Cantonese ? and ?/?). Because of contact with Mongolian and Manchurian peoples, Mandarin has some loanwords from Altaic languages not present in other varieties of Chinese, such as hútòng (??) “alley”. Southern Chinese varieties have borrowed from Tai,[15] Austro-Asiatic,[16] and Austronesian[citation needed] languages.
