Mandarin Chinese

The Mandarin Chinese, or simply Mandarin (in Traditional Chinese, 官話 ; simplified Chinese, 官话; pinyin, guānhuà; literally, 'the speech official'), is a language made up of the set of mutually intelligible Sinitic dialects spoken in north, central, and southwestern China. The Chinese term is, in pinyin, běifānghuà (Traditional: 北方話 / Simplified: 北方话, "speaks the north"). With more than 1.1 billion speakers, it is the main spoken form of Chinese, as well as the language with the largest number of native speakers and the second in number of total speakers in the world. Mandarin is very different from southern Chinese languages, such as Cantonese or Wu, since they are not dialects of Mandarin, but different languages. Mandarin should not be confused with hànyǔ, which includes other Chinese (Han) languages, especially in its written form.

It is estimated that by the year 2050 the Mandarin language will have 1.3 billion speakers, and that by the year 2100 it will have 1.6 billion speakers.

By extension, the term Mandarin is also used to designate the normative or official Chinese language, called “pǔtōnghuà” (普通話 / 普通话 “common communication speech”) in the People's Republic of China, guóyǔ (國語 / 国语, “national language”) in Taiwan and huáyǔ (華語 / 华语, “Chinese language”) in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia. This language is also spoken in countries that have a large number of Chinese immigrants, such as Venezuela, Peru, Canada, Australia, Cuba, Brazil, the United States, Japan, Mexico, Spain, the United Kingdom, Chile, Paraguay, Colombia or Panama. This modern standard language began to take shape at the beginning of the XX century, and is based fundamentally on the Pekingese variety of Mandarin, the běijīnghuà (北京話 / 北京话, "pekingese speech").

The Spanish word "mandarin" (from Portuguese mandarim, from Malay menteri, from Sanskrit mantrī, mantrin, meaning 'minister or adviser') originally designated an official of the Ming and Qing empires. As their native varieties were often mutually unintelligible, these officials communicated using a Koine language based on various northern varieties. When Jesuit missionaries learned this standard language in the 16th century, they called it "Mandarin", for its Chinese name Guānhuà (官话/官話) or 'language of officials'.

Linguistic description

For a description of Standard Mandarin Chinese, see the more specific article.

Lexical comparison

There is great phonological variation within Mandarin, both in segmental phonology and in the realization of tones. The following table reproduces some of the personal pronouns:

Phonology

The consonant inventory of Modern Standard Mandarin Chinese is given by:

The vowel inventory includes: /i, e, a, o, u, y/ (the vowel /y/ is transcribed as <-ü> or <-u->) depending on the context. The vowel /a/ is usually articulated as [a] although together with palatal it can be pronounced as [e], the phoneme /e/ presents an important allophonic variation [ɤ, ə, ɛ]. In addition, there are four different tones that are phonemically distinctive.

Grammar

Mandarin Chinese, like the rest of the Sinitic languages, is an isolating language where many constructions are analytic, syntactically formed, and with residual morphology. The language uses postpositions instead of prepositions. The predominant syntactic order is SVO. These features distance it from the type of other Sino-Tibetan languages, such as the Tibeto-Burmese languages in particular, typologically quite different from the Sinitic languages, although the relationship between Sinitic and Tibeto-Burmese reflected in the lexical forms is clearly recognizable, despite the grammatical changes that have caused the languages of both groups to present very different linguistic typologies.

Dialects

Mandarin Dialects.

The classification of Chinese dialects evolved during the 20th century, and many points remain unresolved. Early classifications tended to follow provincial borders or major landforms.

In 1936, Wang Li produced the first classification based on phonetic criteria, mainly the evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials. His Mandarin group included the dialects of northern and southwestern China, as well as those of Hunan and northern Jiangxi. Li Fang-Kuei's 1937 classification distinguished the latter two groups as Xiang and Gan, while dividing the remaining Mandarin dialects into Northern, Lower Yangtze, and Southwestern Mandarin groups.

Yuan Jiahua's seven-group classification, widely accepted in 1960, kept xiang and gan separate, and divided Mandarin into northern, northwestern, southwestern, and Jiang-Huai (Lower Yangtze) subgroups. Of the four subgroups of Yuan Mandarin, the Northwestern dialects are the most diverse, especially in Shanxi province. [Linguist Li Rong proposed that the dialects of northwestern Shanxi and neighboring areas that retain a final glottal stop in the Middle Chinese tone-entry category (plosive-final) should constitute a separate higher-level group called Jin. Many other linguists continue to include these dialects in the Mandarin group, noting that the lower Yangtze dialects also retain the glottal stop.

The southern boundary of the Mandarin area, with the central Wu, Gan, and Xiang groups, is poorly defined due to centuries of diffusion of northern features. Many border varieties display a mixture of traits that make them difficult to classify. The boundary between Southwestern Mandarin and Xiang is particularly weak, and many early classifications did not separate the two. Zhou Zhenhe and You Rujie include the new xiang dialects within Southwestern Mandarin, treating only the more conservative older xiang dialects as a separate group. The Huizhou dialects have features of both Mandarin and Wu, and have been assigned to one or the other of these groups or treated as separate by various authors. Li Rong and the Linguistic Atlas of China treated it as a separate first-rate group, but this remains controversial.

• Dialecto pekines
• Mandarin del Noreste
• Mandarin jilu
• Mandarin jiaoliao
• Mandarin zhongyuan
• Mandarin lanyin
• Mandarin jianghuai
• Mandarin del Suroeste