30 Facts About Mandarin language

Mandarin language is by far the largest of the seven or ten Chinese dialect groups; it is spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast.

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

Chinese capital has been within the Mandarin language-speaking area for most of the last millennium, making these dialects very influential.

Some form of Mandarin language 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.

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Recent increased migration from Mandarin-speaking regions of China and Taiwan has now resulted in the language being one of the more frequently used varieties of Chinese among Chinese diaspora communities.

In everyday English, "Mandarin language" refers to Standard Chinese, which is often called simply "Chinese".

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

Linguists use the term "Mandarin language" to refer to the diverse group of dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China, which Chinese linguists call Guanhua.

New genres of vernacular literature were based on this Mandarin language, including verse, drama and story forms, such as the qu and sanqu poetry.

However, the Mandarin language still retained a final -m, which has merged with -n in modern dialects and initial voiced fricatives.

Literary Mandarin language was less appropriate for recording materials that were meant to be reproduced in oral presentations, materials such as plays and grist for the professional story-teller's mill.

Knowledge of this Mandarin language was thus essential for an official career, but it was never formally defined.

Variant of Mandarin 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, the varieties of Mandarin language cover a huge area containing nearly a billion people.

The Manchu people of the area now speak these dialects exclusively; their native Mandarin language is only maintained in northwestern Xinjiang, where Xibe, a modern dialect, is spoken.

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

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

Mandarin language started to become widely spoken in Taiwan following the Kuomintang's relocation and influx of refugees from the mainland at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.

Standard Singaporean Mandarin language 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 language is increasingly used alongside Cantonese as a lingua franca in part due to Singaporean influence.

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

Many other linguists continue to include these dialects in the Mandarin language 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 language, treating only the more conservative Old Xiang dialects as a separate group.

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

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

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

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

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