Mandarin Chinese

This article is about all of the Northern and Southwestern Chinese dialects. For the official spoken standardized Chinese language (Putonghua/Guoyu), see Standard Mandarin.
Mandarin Chinese
Traditional Chinese 官話
Simplified Chinese 官话
Hanyu Pinyin Guān Huà
Commonly known as
Traditional Chinese 北方話
Simplified Chinese 北方话
Mandarin
官話/官话
Spoken in
Region Most of northern and southwestern China, Taiwan and Singapore (and other overseas Chinese communities)
Total speakers 885 million (first language speakers) [1]
Total Speakers: 1,365,053,177[1]
Ranking 1 (native speakers)
Language family Sino-Tibetan
Language codes
ISO 639-1 zh
ISO 639-2 chi (B)  zho (T)
ISO 639-3 cmn
Linguasphere
Mandarin in China.png
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Mandarin (simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話; pinyin: Guānhuà; literally "speech of officials" or simplified Chinese: 北方话; traditional Chinese: 北方 話; pinyin: Běifānghuà; literally "northern dialect(s)"), 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 official standardized language of China based on the Beijing dialect.

"Mandarin" is also a general term describing, in particular, an official of Imperial China or a similar system.

In English, Mandarin can refer to either of two distinct concepts:

The use of Mandarin as indicating a grouping of northern Chinese dialects is defined and used mainly by linguists, and is not commonly used outside of academic circles. Instead, Chinese native speakers of forms of Mandarin other than Standard Mandarin typically do not describe the language they speak as "Mandarin" (simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話; pinyin: Guānhuà or simplified Chinese: 北方话; traditional Chinese: 北方 話; pinyin: Běifānghuà; literally "Northern Dialect)"), but rather are most likely to simply state the name of the geographic variant that they speak, for example Sichuan dialect, Hebei dialect or Northeastern dialect, considered distinct from "Standard Mandarin" (Putonghua). Native speakers who are not academic linguists may not recognize that the variants they speak are classified in linguistics as members of Mandarin ("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 speakers.

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.

Contents

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 (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[2].

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[3]

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 mandorijn, from Malay [məntəˈri], from Hindi mantri, from Sanskrit mantrin (meaning councilor or minister[4]); it is a translation of the Chinese term Guānhuà (simplified Chinese: 官话; traditional Chinese: 官話), 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 (simplified Chinese: 北方话; traditional Chinese: 北方話), or the dialect(s) of the North, although this term is used less and less among Chinese linguists in favour of "Guānhuà".

Standard Mandarin

Main article: Standard Mandarin

From an official point of view, there are two versions of Standard Mandarin, 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 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:

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

See Mandarin phonology for a description of Standard Mandarin phonology and dialects of Mandarin for an overview of the phonologies of Mandarin dialects.

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:

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).

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/儂 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/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 hútong (胡同) "alley". Southern Chinese varieties have borrowed from Tai[5], Austro-Asiatic[6], 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 "computer" is 电脑 (diànnǎo). The first word means "electric" whilst the second means "brain".

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. For example, 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. To do this 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, 妈妈给我们的钱,我已经买了糖了. 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. 昨天发脾气的外交警察取消了沒有交钱的那些人的入境证. Zuó tiān fā pí qìde wài jiāo jǐng chá qǔ xiāole méi yǒu jiāo qiánde nà xiē rénde 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

Main article: Chinese character

The writing system for almost all the varieties of Chinese is based on a set of written logograms 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 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 from 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 PRC (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 這裏/這裡 and 那裏/那裡 to 这里 and 那里. (See Simplified Chinese for more.)

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 (《紅樓夢/红楼梦》; usually translated as "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 (胡适), wrote an influential and perceptive study of this literary tradition, entitled Báihuà Wénxuéshǐ (A history of vernacular literature).

See also

References

  1. ↑ Top Ten Internet Languages - World Internet Statistics
  2. ↑ 南方口音，北方腔调—人民网
  3. ↑ FOURMONT, Etienne. Linguae Sinarum Mandarinicae hieroglyphicae grammatica duplex, latinè, & cum characteribus Sinensium. Item Sinicorum Regiae Bibliothecae librorum catalogus…
  4. ↑ mandarin, Online Etymology Dictionary
  5. ↑ Ramsey, S. Robert (1987). The Languages of China. Princeton University Press. pp. 36–8. ISBN 0-691-01468-X. 
  6. ↑ Norman, Jerry; Mei, Tsu-lin (1976). "The Austroasiatics in ancient South China: some lexical evidence". Monumenta Serica 32: 274–301. 

Further reading

External links