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'''Mandarin''' ({{zh|t=[[wikt:官|官]][[wikt:話|話]]|s=[[wikt:官|官]][[wikt:话|话]]|p=Guānhuà|l=speech of officials}}) is a group of related [[Chinese dialect]]s spoken across most of northern and south-western [[China]]. Because Mandarin mainly includes speech groups found in the north, the term "northern dialect(s)" ({{zh|s=[[wikt:北|北]][[wikt:方|方]][[wikt:话|话]]|t=[[wikt:北|北]][[wikt:方|方]] [[wikt:話|話]]|p=Běifānghuà}}) also names this language group on an informal basis. |
'''Mandarin''' ({{zh|t=[[wikt:官|官]][[wikt:話|話]]|s=[[wikt:官|官]][[wikt:话|话]]|p=Guānhuà|l=speech of officials}}; [[General Chinese]]: ''Cuon-huah'') is a group of related [[Chinese dialect]]s spoken across most of northern and south-western [[China]]. Because Mandarin mainly includes speech groups found in the north, the term "northern dialect(s)" ({{zh|s=[[wikt:北|北]][[wikt:方|方]][[wikt:话|话]]|t=[[wikt:北|北]][[wikt:方|方]] [[wikt:話|話]]|p=Běifānghuà}}) also names this language group on an informal basis. |
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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. |
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. |
Revision as of 07:31, 22 March 2011
Mandarin Chinese | |||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Traditional Chinese | 官話 | ||||||
Simplified Chinese | 官话 | ||||||
Hanyu Pinyin | Guānhuà | ||||||
| |||||||
Commonly known as | |||||||
Traditional Chinese | 北方話 | ||||||
Simplified Chinese | 北方话 | ||||||
Hanyu Pinyin | Běifāng Huà | ||||||
|
Mandarin | |
---|---|
官話/官话 | |
Native to | People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, United States (chiefly New York City), Myanmar |
Region | Most of northern and southwestern China, Taiwan and Singapore (and other overseas Chinese communities) |
Native speakers | Native: 845 million[1] Overall: 1,365,053,177[2] |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-1 | zh |
ISO 639-2 | chi (B) zho (T) |
ISO 639-3 | cmn |
Mandarin (simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話; pinyin: Guānhuà; lit. 'speech of officials'; General Chinese: Cuon-huah) is a group of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and south-western China. Because Mandarin mainly includes speech groups found in the north, the term "northern dialect(s)" (simplified Chinese: 北方话; traditional Chinese: 北方 話; pinyin: Běifānghuà) also names this language group on an informal basis.
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".
Name
The word "mandarin" (from Portuguese mandarim, from Malay [məntəˈri], 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 Guānhuà (官话/官話) "speech of officials".[4]
In everyday English, "Mandarin" refers to Standard Chinese (Pǔtōnghuà / Guóyǔ / Huáyǔ), 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 Guānhuà is considered an archaic name for the standard language by Chinese speakers of today.
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 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 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 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.
History
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] In 1985 Li Rong suggested that the Jin dialects should be considered a separate branch.
Old Mandarin
After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty, northern China was under the control of the Jin (Jurchen) and Yuan (Mongol) dynasties. During this period a new 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.[6]
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 stop consonants and the reorganization of the Middle Chinese tones.[6]
In Middle Chinese, initial stops and affricates 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 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.[7]
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 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- and 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 tā (他), can be traced back to the Tang Dynasty.[8]
Standard Chinese
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: 正音书院; traditional Chinese: 正音書院; pinyin: Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) in an attempt to make local pronunciations conform to the Beijing standard so that the Emperor could communicate with all officials directly.[10]
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 and Macau). 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.[11]
From an official point of view, there are two versions of Standard Chinese, since the PRC government refers to that on the Mainland as Pǔtōnghuà (Chinese: 普通话, Chinese: 普通話), whereas the ROC government refers to their official language as Kuoyü (Chinese: 國語, Chinese: Kuo²-yü³; Chinese: 国语, pinyin: Guóyǔ).
Technically, both Pǔtōnghuà and Guóyǔ base their phonology on the Beijing accent, though Pǔtōnghuà 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. Pǔtōnghuà and Guóyǔ also have some differences from the Beijing dialect in vocabulary, grammar, and pragmatics.
It is important to note that the terms Pǔtōnghuà (Chinese: widespread common language) and Guóyǔ (Chinese: nation 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 the two forms.
Geographic distribution and dialects
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.[12][13]
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 Liaoning) was not settled by Han Chinese until the 18th century,[14] and as a result the Northeastern Mandarin dialects spoken there differ little from Beijing Mandarin. The Manchu people of the area now speak these dialects exclusively. 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.[15]
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. Jianghuai Mandarin, spoken in Jiangsu province north of the Yangtze River and also in Nanjing, sometimes resembles a cross between Mandarin and Wu Chinese, spoken in most of Jiangsu south of the Yangtze River, Shanghai and Zhejiang province.
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.[16]
Phonology
Unlike Cantonese and Min Nan which are syllable-timed languages, Mandarin is a stress-timed language (Avery & Ehrlich 1992)[17] like many western languages including English.
Syllables consist maximally of an initial consonant, a glide, a vowel, a final, and tone. Not every syllable that is possible according to this rule actually exists in Mandarin, as there are rules prohibiting certain phonemes from appearing with others, and in practice there are only a few hundred distinct syllables.
Phonological features that are generally shared by the Mandarin dialects include:
- the palatalization of velars and alveolar sibilants when they occur before palatal glides;
- the disappearance of final stops and /-m/ (although in many Jianghuai Mandarin and Jin dialects, the glottal stop has been preserved as a final);
- the disappearance of the entering tone (although it has been preserved in many Jianghuai Mandarin and Jin dialects) and the presence of four tonal categories;
- the presence of retroflex consonants (although these are absent in many dialects of Southwestern and Northeastern Mandarin);
- the historical devoicing of plosives and sibilants.
Vocabulary
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- (老), -zi (子), -(e)r (兒/儿), and -tou (頭/头), or by compounding, e.g. by combining two words of similar meaning as in cōngmáng (匆忙), 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 (蝴蝶) "butterfly".
The singular pronouns in Mandarin are wǒ (我) "I", nǐ (你/妳) "you", nín (您) "you (formal)", and tā (他/她/它) "he/she/it", with -men (們/们) added for the plural. Further, there is a distinction between the plural first-person pronoun zánmen (咱們/咱们), which is inclusive of the listener, and wǒmen (我們/我们), 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 侬/儂 non "you" and 伊 yi "he/she").[18]
The subordinative particle de (的) is also characteristic of Mandarin dialects.[19] Other morphemes that these dialects tend to share are aspect and mood particles, such as -le (了), -zhe (著/着), and -guo (過/过). Other Chinese varieties tend to use different words in some of these contexts (e.g., Cantonese 咗 and 緊/紧). 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 (胡同) "alley". Southern Chinese varieties have borrowed from Tai,[20] Austro-Asiatic,[21] and Austronesian[22] languages.
Literature
Chinese writing may originally have closely represented the way people spoke, but with time it diverged strongly from speech, and was learned and composed as a special language. The written language, called "classical Chinese" or "literary Chinese", is much more concise than spoken Chinese, the main reason being that a single written character is often just what one wants to communicate yet its single syllable would communicate an ambiguous meaning if spoken because of the huge number of homophones. For instance, 翼 (yì, wing) is unambiguous in written Chinese but would be lost among its more than 75 homophones in spoken Chinese.
For writing formal histories, for writing government documents, and even for writing poetry and fiction, the written language was adequate and economical of both printing resources and the human effort of writing things down. But to record materials that were meant to be reproduced in oral presentations, materials such as plays and grist for the professional story-teller's mill, the classical written language was not appropriate. Even written records of the words of a famous teacher like Zhu Xi (1130–1200) tend strongly to reflect his spoken language. 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 vernacular Chinese literature (白話文學/白话文学; báihuà wénxué). In many cases this written language reflected the Mandarin spoken language, 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.
A pivotal character during the first half of the twentieth century, Hu Shih wrote an influential and perceptive study of this literary tradition, entitled Báihuà Wénxuéshǐ (A history of vernacular literature).
See also
References
- Footnotes
- ^ Lewis, M. Paul, ed. (2009). "Chinese, Mandarin". Ethnologue: Languages of the World (16th ed.). Dallas: SIL International. ISBN 978-1-55671-216-6.
{{cite book}}
: External link in
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|chapterurl=
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suggested) (help) - ^ Top Ten Internet Languages - World Internet Statistics
- ^ "mandarin", Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Vol. 1 (6th ed.). Oxford University Press. 2007. ISBN 978-0-19-920687-2.
- ^ Coblin, W. South (2000). "A brief history of Mandarin". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 120 (4): 537–552. doi:10.2307/606615.
- ^ Norman (1988), p 181.
- ^ a b c Norman (1988), pp 48–52.
- ^ Norman (1988), pp 34–36, 52–54.
- ^ Norman (1988), pp 111–132.
- ^ FOURMONT, Etienne. Linguae Sinarum Mandarinicae hieroglyphicae grammatica duplex, latinè, & cum characteribus Sinensium. Item Sinicorum Regiae Bibliothecae librorum catalogus…
- ^ 南方口音,北方腔调—人民网
- ^ Zhang, Bennan; Yang, Robin R. (2004). "Putonghua education and language policy in postcolonial Hong Kong". In Zhou, Minglang (ed.) (ed.). Language policy in the People's Republic of China: theory and practice since 1949. Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 143–161. ISBN 978-1-4020-8038-8.
{{cite book}}
:|editor-first=
has generic name (help) - ^ Norman (1988), pp 183–190.
- ^ Ramsey (1987), p 22.
- ^ Richards (2003) pp 138–139.
- ^ Ramsey (1987), p 21.
- ^ Norman (1988), p 191.
- ^ Avery, Peter, and Susan Ehrlich. (1992).Teaching American English pronunciation. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
- ^ Norman (1988), pp 182, 195–196.
- ^ Norman (1988), p 196.
- ^ Ramsey (1987) pp. 36–38.
- ^ Norman, Jerry (1976). "The Austroasiatics in ancient South China: some lexical evidence". Monumenta Serica. 32: 274–301.
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suggested) (help) - ^ Chang, Fu-chu "Babuza". "What is Taiwanese?". Retrieved 14 February 2011.
- Works cited
- Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-29653-3.
- Ramsey, S. Robert (1987). The Languages of China. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0-691-01468-5.
- Richards, John F. (2003). The unending frontier: an environmental history of the early modern world. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-23075-0.
Further reading
- Chao, Yuen Ren (1968). A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-00219-9.
- Novotná, Z., "Contributions to the Study of Loan-Words and Hybrid Words in Modern Chinese", Archiv Orientalni, (Prague), No.35 (1967), (In English: examples of loan words and calques in Chinese)
External links
- Arch Chinese - Learn To Read And Write Chinese Characters - Online Chinese character stroke order animations for all the simplified and 7,000 traditional characters, along with native speaker pronunciations, character decomposition, writing worksheet generation, example words and sentences, Pinyin table, radical table and character learning flashcards.
- BBC, BBC (this specifically refers to Mandarin Chinese)
- Mandarin - a Category III language Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers
- Mandarin Chinese Phrasebook at Wikitravel
- A keyboard for typing Chinese characters for Firefox
- Mandarin Chinese Swadesh list of basic vocabulary words (from Wiktionary's Swadesh list appendix)