Mandarin ( or ), is a category of related
Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and south-western
China. When taken as a separate language, as is often done in academic literature, the Mandarin language has more native speakers than any other language. The "standard" in
Standard Mandarin refers to the standard Beijing dialect of the Mandarin language.
Mandarin is also a general term describing any grade of nobility in the Chinese Imperial Court.
In English,
Mandarin can refer to either of two distinct concepts:
- In its broader sense, Mandarin is a diverse group of Mandarin dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China (Guanhua / Beifanghua / Beifang fangyan). This group of dialects is the focus of this article.
The latter grouping is 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 non-Standard Mandarin will describe the variant that they are speaking, for example
Southwestern Mandarin or
Northeastern Mandarin, and consider it distinct from "Standard Mandarin"
(putonghua); 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; rather, there are strong regional identities centred on individual dialects, because of the wide geographical distribution and cultural diversity of its speakers.
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.
History
The present divisions of the Chinese language developed out of the different ways in which dialects of
Old Chinese and
Middle Chinese evolved.
Most Chinese living in northern and south-western China are native speakers of a dialect of Mandarin. The prevalence of this linguistic homogeneity in northern China is largely the result of geography: much of northern China is covered by plains and is flat. In contrast to this, the mountains and rivers of southern China have promoted linguistic diversity.
Chronologically, there is no clear line to mark where
Middle Chinese ends and Mandarin begins; however, the
Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn (中原音韵), a
rhyme book from the
Yuan Dynasty, is widely regarded as a milestone in the history of Mandarin. In this rhyme 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.
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 () in an attempt to make local pronunciations conform to the Beijing standard so that the Emperor could communicate with all officials directly. These attempts, however, had little success.
thumb|Zhongguo Guanhua (中國官話), or Medii Regni Communis Loquela ("Middle Kingdom's Common Speech"), used on the frontispiece of an early Chinese grammar published by [[Étienne Fourmont (with
Arcadio Huang) in 1742]]
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 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 Standard Mandarin is very influential now.
Name and classification
The
English term comes from the
Portuguese mandarim or
Dutch mandarijn, from
Indonesian/
Malay məntəri, from
Hindi mantri, from
Sanskrit mantrin (meaning
councilor or minister); it is a translation of the Chinese term
Guānhuà (), 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 often used 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 (), or the dialect(s) of the North, although this term is used less and less among Chinese linguists in favour of "
Guānhuà".
Standard Mandarin
From an official point of view, there are two versions of
Standard Mandarin, since the
People's Republic of China government refers to that on the Mainland as
Putonghua, whereas the
Republic of China 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 Mandarin 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 differ 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.
Dialects
The eight main dialect areas of Mandarin in Mainland China.
There are regional variations in Mandarin. This is manifested in two ways:
- Standard Mandarin has been promoted very actively by the PRC, the ROC, and Singapore as a second language. As a result, those who are not native speakers of Standard Mandarin frequently flavour it with a strong infusion of the sounds of their native languages.
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.)
Phonology
Unlike
Cantonese and
Min Nan which are
syllable timed languages, Mandarin is a
stress timed language (Avery & Ehrlich 1992) 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 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 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—usually by forming new words via compounding, or by adding
affixes such as
lao- (老),
-zi (子),
-(e)r (兒/儿), and
-tou (頭/头). There are also a small number of words that have been polysyllabic since Old Chinese, such as
húdié (蝴蝶, butterfly). (Please refer to Matteo Ricci's China in the Sixteenth Century, "All Chinese words, without exception, are monosyllabic." )
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, but not with other varieties of Chinese (e.g.,
Shanghainese has 侬
non "you" and 伊
yi "he/she").
Other morphemes that Mandarin 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).
Because of contact with Mongolian and Manchurian peoples, Mandarin has some loanwords from
Altaic languages not present in other varieties of Chinese, such as
hútong (胡同) "alley".
Southern Chinese varieties have borrowed from
Tai,
Austro-Asiatic, and
Austronesian languages.
Word formation
The most common way used to form polysyllabic words in Mandarin is to aggregate words according to their meaning. For instance, the word for "typewriter" is 打字機 dǎ zì jī. The first word means "to strike," used because in typing one's fingers strike the keys. The second word means "character" (and, by extension, "letter"). The third word means "machine." So the combination means "machine for knocking out characters."
Another possibility is to combine two words of similar meaning such as 匆忙 cōng máng, the first meaning "hurried" and the second meaning "busy."
Borrowed words are at times written with a combination of Chinese characters that attempt to approximate the pronunciation of the foreign term. For example, "laser" can be written as 雷射 léi shè. Literally the two Chinese characters mean "thunder" and "to shoot [arrows]" and, by extension, "to radiate."
Syntax
Chinese is similar to English in many of its syntactic characteristics. It frequently forms sentences by stating a subject and following it by a predicate. The predicate can be an intransitive verb, a transitive verb followed by a direct object, a linking verb followed by a predicate nominative, etc.
Chinese differs from English in distinguishing between names of things, which can stand as predicate nominatives, and names of characteristics. Names of characteristics (e.g., green) cannot follow linking verbs. There is no equivalent of the English predicate adjective. Instead, abstract characterizations such as "green," "angry," "hot," etc., stand as complete predicates in their own right. So one says, e.g., 我不累. Wǒ bú lèi. The word-for-word version in English would be, "I not tired."
Chinese differs from English in that it forms another kind of sentence by stating a topic and following it by a comment. In English, speakers generally flag the topic of a sentence by prefacing it with "as for." For instance, one might say, "As for the money that Mama gave us, I have already bought candy with it." Note that the comment in this case is itself a complete sentence with subject, verb, and object. The Chinese version is simply, 媽媽給我們的錢,我已經買了糖了. Māma géi wǒmende qián, wó yǐjīng mǎile táng le. This is translated somewhat directly as, "The money Mom gave us, I already bought candy," lacking a preface as in English.
Chinese does not have tense. Instead it uses a combination of aspect markers and markers of modality. In other words, it employs single syllables that indicate such things as (1) that the subject of the sentence did something that was expected or anticipated, (2) that the subject of the sentence has gone through some experience within a stated or implicit time period, (3) that a statement that was formerly not the case has now become true, i.e., that there has been a change of status, (4) that there still has not been a change in a condition previously noted, etc.
The time that something happened can be given by an explicit term such as "yesterday," by relative terms such as "formerly," etc.
Another major difference between the syntax of Chinese and languages like English lies in the stacking order of modifying clauses. 昨天發脾氣的外交警察取消了沒有交錢的那些人的入境証. Zuó tiān fā pí qì
de wài jiāo jǐng chá qǔ xiāole méi yǒu jiāo qián
de nà xiē rén
de rù jīng zhèng. Using the Chinese order in English, that sentence would be:
"[Yesterday got angry] --> foreign affairs policeman canceled [did not pay] --> [those people]'s visas.
In more ordinary English order, that would be:
The foreign affairs policeman who got angry yesterday canceled the visas of those people who did not pay.
There are a few other features of the Mandarin language that would be unfamiliar to speakers of English, but the features mentioned above are generally the most noticeable.
Writing system
The writing system for almost all the varieties of Chinese is based on a set of written symbols that has been passed down with little change for more than two thousand years. Each of these varieties of Chinese has developed some new words during this time, words for which there are no matching characters in the original set. While it is of course possible to invent new characters (as was done to represent many elements in the periodic table), a more common course of development has been to borrow old characters that have fallen into disuse on the basis of their pronunciations. Chinese Characters were traditionally read top to bottom, right to left, but in modern usage it is more common to read from left to right.
In the original set of characters and definitions (containing more than 40,000 items) there were the
demonstrative pronouns "this" (此,
cǐ) and "that" (彼,
bǐ). But these terms were rare in spoken Mandarin, where "zhè" and "nà" (or regional variants of them) were used instead. There are no components in the original set that have those meanings associated with those pronunciations, so a word pronounced "zhè" (这／這) was borrowed to write "this", and a word pronounced "nà" (那) was borrowed to write "that". Originally, 這 meant "to go forward to meet someone", and 那 was the name of a country (and later became a rare surname).
As with other varieties of Chinese, the government of the People's Republic of China (as well as some other governments and institutions) has put a set of simplified forms into operation. Under this system, the forms of the words "here" (zhèlǐ) and "there" (nàlǐ) changed from 這裡 and 那裡 to 这里 and 那里. (See
Simplified Chinese for more.)
Mandarin literature
Originally, written Chinese was learned and composed as a special language. It may originally have rather closely represented the way people spoke, but with time the spoken and written languages diverged rather strongly. 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
homonyms. For instance, 翼 (yì, wing) is unambiguous in written Chinese but would be lost among its more than 75 homonyms 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 (朱熹；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
Shuihu Zhuan (《水浒传》;
Outlaws of the marsh), on down to the Qing dynasty novel
Honglou Meng (《红楼梦》; usually translated as "
Dream of the Red Chamber") and beyond, there developed a vernacular Chinese literature (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 Shi (胡适), wrote an influential and perceptive study of this literary tradition, entitled
Báihuà Wénxuéshǐ (A history of vernacular literature).
See also
