32 Facts About Mandarin Chinese

The final stops of Middle Mandarin Chinese have disappeared in most of these varieties, but some have merged them as a final glottal stop.

Many Mandarin varieties, including the Beijing dialect, retain retroflex initial consonants, which have been lost in southern varieties of Chinese.

Some form of Mandarin Chinese has served as a lingua franca for government officials and the courts since the 14th century.

Standard Mandarin Chinese is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Taiwan, as well as one of the four official languages of Singapore.

Standard Mandarin Chinese is based on Beijing dialect, with some lexical and syntactic influence from other Mandarin dialects.

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In Middle Mandarin Chinese, initial stops and affricates showed a three-way contrast between tenuis, voiceless aspirated and voiced consonants.

Until the early 20th century, formal writing and even much poetry and fiction was done in Literary Mandarin Chinese, which was modeled on the classics of the Warring States period and the Han dynasty.

Over time, the various spoken varieties diverged greatly from Literary Mandarin Chinese, which was learned and composed as a special language.

Until the mid-20th century, most Mandarin Chinese people living in many parts of South China spoke only their local variety.

Variant of Mandarin Chinese as spoken by educated classes in Beijing was made the official language of China by the Qing dynasty in the early 1900s and the successive Republican government.

However in other parts of the Mandarin Chinese-speaking world, namely Hong Kong and Macau, the standard form of Mandarin Chinese used in education, the media, formal speech, and everyday life remains the local Cantonese because of their colonial and linguistic history.

However, the varieties of Mandarin Chinese cover a huge area containing nearly a billion people.

Elsewhere in China, Standard Mandarin Chinese has heavily influenced local languages through diglossia or in some cases, replaced them entirely .

Unlike their compatriots on the southeast coast, few Mandarin Chinese speakers engaged in overseas emigration until the late 20th century, but there are now significant communities of them in cities across the world.

At the time Taiwanese Hokkien, and to a lesser extent Hakka, were the Mandarin Chinese languages used among the local Han Mandarin Chinese population, while the Formosan languages were natively spoken by many Aboriginal populations.

Mandarin Chinese is one of the four official languages of Singapore along with English, Malay, and Tamil.

Standard Singaporean Mandarin Chinese is nearly identical to the standards of China and Taiwan, with minor vocabulary differences.

In Malaysia, Mandarin has been adopted by local Chinese-language schools as the medium of instruction with the standard based on that of Singapore.

An exception is in the state of Johor, where Mandarin Chinese is increasingly used alongside Cantonese as a lingua franca in part due to Singaporean influence.

Classification of Mandarin Chinese dialects evolved during the 20th century, and many points remain unsettled.

Widely accepted seven-group classification of Yuan Jiahua in 1960 kept Xiang and Gan separate, with Mandarin Chinese divided into Northern, Northwestern, Southwestern and Jiang–Huai subgroups.

The linguist Li Rong proposed that the northwestern dialects of Shanxi and neighbouring areas that retain a final glottal stop in the Middle Mandarin Chinese entering tone category should constitute a separate top-level group called Jin.

Mandarin Chinese used this classification in the Language Atlas of China .

Many other linguists continue to include these dialects in the Mandarin Chinese group, pointing out that the Lower Yangtze dialects retain the glottal stop.

Zhou Zhenhe and You Rujie include the New Xiang dialects within Southwestern Mandarin Chinese, treating only the more conservative Old Xiang dialects as a separate group.

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Atlas includes several unclassified Mandarin Chinese dialects spoken in scattered pockets across southeastern China, such as Nanping in Fujian and Dongfang on Hainan.

Maximal inventory of initials of a Mandarin Chinese dialect is as follows, with bracketed pinyin spellings given for those present in the standard language:.

In general, no two Mandarin Chinese-speaking areas have exactly the same set of tone values, but most Mandarin Chinese-speaking areas have very similar tone distribution.

Middle Mandarin Chinese stops and affricates had a three-way distinction between tenuis, voiceless aspirate and voiced consonants.

Dialects of Mandarin Chinese agree with each other quite consistently on these pronouns.

Southern Mandarin Chinese varieties have borrowed from Tai, Austroasiatic, and Austronesian languages.

Some characters in Mandarin Chinese can be combined with others to indicate a particular meaning just like prefix and suffix in English.