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Mandarin (linguistics)

(Redirected from Mandarin Chinese)
Mandarin (北方话)
Note: The standardized varieties are called Putonghua 普通话 and Guoyu 國語, but are usually called Mandarin in English
Spoken in: China (the PRC and the ROC), Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and other Chinese communities around the world
Region: Most of northern and southwestern China; widely understood in the rest of China
Total speakers: 867.2 million
Ranking: 1 [1]
Genetic
classification:
Sino-Tibetan

 Chinese
  Mandarin

Official status
Official language of: in the standardized forms of Putonghua or Guoyu: PRC, ROC, Singapore
Regulated by: in the PRC: various agencies
in the ROC: Mandarin Promotion Council
in Singapore: Promote Mandarin Council /Speak Mandarin Campaign [2]
Language codes
ISO 639-1 zh
RFC 3066 zh-guoyu
ISO 639-2(B) chi
ISO 639-2(T) zho
SIL CHN


Mandarin, when used in English, is used to translate several different Chinese terms referring to mutually related categories under Chinese spoken language.

In the narrow sense, Mandarin refers to Putonghua and Guoyu, which are two nearly identical standardized spoken languages based on the broad spoken tongue of Beifanghua (see below). This is the usual sense of the word "Mandarin" when used in a non-academic context. See Putonghua and Guoyu for more information.

In the broad sense, Mandarin refers to Beifanghua (literally "Northern speech"), which is a category comprising many Chinese dialects in most of northern and southwestern China. This sense of Mandarin is usually found in academic contexts only; it will also be the sense used by the rest of this article. Putonghua and Guoyu will be referred to using their Chinese names, or with the terms "standard Mandarin" or "standard Chinese".

Beifanghua, as a category, has more speakers than any other language, and beifanghua also provides the basis for Putonghua and Guoyu. However, one should note that beifanghua encompasses a large number of mutually unintelligible dialects. In addition, beifanghua as a concept is very rarely used outside of academic circles as a self-description. When asked to describe the spoken form they are using, Chinese speaking a form of beifanghua will describe the variant that they are speaking, for example Sichuan dialect or Northeast China dialect . Although Chinese will often strongly identify with the variant of Mandarin they speak as part of their identification with their home province, there is very little collectively identification with the concept of Northern speech as a whole.

Like all other varieties of Chinese, there is plenty of dispute as to whether Mandarin is a language or a dialect. Please see here for the issues surrounding this dispute.

Contents

History

The present main divisions of the Chinese language developed out of Ancient Chinese and Middle Chinese.

Most Chinese living in a broad arc, from the north-east (Manchuria) to the south-west (Yunnan), use various Mandarin dialects as their home language. The prevalence of linguistic homogeneity (i.e. Mandarin) throughout northern China is largely the result of geography, namely the plains of north China. By contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China have promoted linguistic diversity. The presence of Mandarin in southwest China is largely due to a plague in the 12th century in Sichuan. This plague, which may have been related to the black death, depopulated the area, leading to later settlement from north China.

There is no clear dividing line where Middle Chinese ends and Mandarin begins; however, the Zhongyuan Yinyun , a rhyme book from the Yuan Dynasty, is widely regarded as an important 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.

Image:Mandarin_sub-dialects.png
Click here for uncropped version

Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese living in southern China did not speak any Mandarin. However, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various Chinese dialects, Beijingese Mandarin became dominant at least during the officially Manchu-speaking Qing Empire. Since the 17th century, the Empire had set up Orthoepy Academies (正音書院 Zhengyin Shuyuan) in an attempt to make pronunciation conform to the Beijing standard. But these attempts had little success.

This situation changed with the creation (in both the PRC and the ROC) of an elementary school education system committed to teaching Mandarin. As a result, Mandarin is now spoken fluently by most people in Mainland China and in Taiwan. In Hong Kong, the language of education and formal speech remains Cantonese but Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.

Name and classification

The English term comes from the Portuguese mandarim (from Malay menteri [3][4] from Sanskrit mantrin-, meaning minister; in Chinese 满大人); it is a translation of the Chinese term Guānhuà (官話; simplified: 官话), 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 used sometimes by linguists as a collective term to refer to all varieties and dialects of Mandarin, not just Putonghua and Guoyu. Another term commonly used to refer to all varieties of Mandarin is Běifānghuà (北方話, simplified: 北方话), or the dialect(s) of the North.

The following Mandarin recording is a faithful translation of the Taiwanese recording (which was made first). They both mean, "Today that girl came to our home to see me." To help focus on what is being said and how they differ, here are the word-by-word English equivalents, a rather imperfect rendering of the spoken Taiwanese into an informal transliteration, a POJ transliteration, the same style of transliteration of the spoken Mandarin, and the pinyin version of the Mandarin:

 Today______that_____girl____________comes-to_our_____home_[to]_see__me.
Gin-na-jit_hill-lay_dza-bo-gee-nah__lai______gwon____dow_______kwon_ngwah.
Kina-zit___hit__e___ca-bo__gina_____lai______guan____ta________khua:_gua.
Jin-tien___nay-guh__nyu-hi-dz_______dow______dza-mun_jia__lie__khan_woh.
Jintian____neige____nǚhaizi____dao______zanmen__jia__lai__kan__wo.

To hear the Taiwanese version, click here.
To hear the Mandarin version, click here.

Standardized Mandarin

Main articles: Putonghua and Guoyu

From an official point of view, there are two versions of standardized spoken Mandarin, since the Beijing government refers to that on the Mainland as Putonghua, whereas the Taipei government refers to their official language as Kuo-yü (Guoyu in pinyin).

Technically, both Putonghua and Guoyu base their phonology on the Beijing dialect , 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" Mandarin are often quite different from the Mandarin that is spoken in accordance with regional habits, and neither is identical to even 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" and "Guoyu" 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.

Variations

Main article: Dialects of Mandarin

There are regional variations in Mandarin. This is manifested in two ways:

  1. Various dialects of Mandarin cover a huge area containing nearly a billion people. As a result, there are pronounced regional variations in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar encountered as one moves from place to place. These regional differences are as pronounced as (or more so than) the regional versions of the English language found in England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the United States.
  2. Standard Mandarin has been promoted very actively by the PRC, the ROC, and Singapore as a second language. As a result, native speakers of both Mandarin varieties and non-Mandarin Chinese varieties frequently flavor it with a strong infusion of the speech sounds of their native tongues.

Dialects of Mandarin can be subdivided into eight categories: Beijing, Northeastern, Ji-Lu, Jiao-Liao, Zhongyuan, Lan-Yin, Southwestern, and Jianghuai. Jin is sometimes considered the ninth category of Mandarin (others separate it from Mandarin altogether).

In both Mainland China and Taiwan, Mandarin in predominantly Han Chinese areas is taught by immersion starting in elementary school. After the second grade, the entire educational system is in Mandarin, except for local language classes that have been taught for a few hours each week in Taiwan starting in the mid-1990s.

However, the era of mass education in Mandarin has not erased these earlier regional differences. In the south, the interaction between Mandarin and local variations of Chinese has produced local versions of the "Northern" language that are rather different from that official standard Mandarin in both pronunciation and grammar.

Transcription systems

Ever since the first Westerners entered China and attempted to learn Mandarin, the need for some kind of phonetic transcription system to record the pronunciation of Chinese characters became apparent. Over the years, many such systems have been proposed. The first to be widely accepted was the Wade-Giles system, named after its 19th century inventors. This system is still in use today, though not in mainland China. It is now mostly encountered in older textbooks, histories, etc.

In the 20th century, Chinese linguists proposed various transcription systems, one of which even introduced a whole new syllabic alphabet: the Zhuyin system (Bopomofo). The most successful of these transcription systems was Hanyu Pinyin, which was accepted as the official transcription system for the Chinese language by the PRC in 1958 and later by the United Nations and other international organizations. During the 1950s, there were plans for Pinyin to supersede the Chinese characters. These plans, however, proved to be impractical due to the large number of homonyms in the Chinese language.

A variety of transcription systems are used on Taiwan. The ROC central government adopted Tongyong Pinyin in 2002, but has permitted local governments to override that decision in favor of their own preferred romanization systems. Zhuyin is used as the method for teaching pronunciation of characters and compounds in schools. Efforts to phase out this system in favor of pinyin have been stalled due to disagreements over which form of pinyin to use, and the massive effort needed to produce new educational materials and to completely retrain teachers..

Other less popular or outdated Romanizations include:

Sounds

The following describes the sounds of standardized Mandarin, or Putonghua/Guoyu.

Onsets

The following is the onset (initial consonant) inventory of standard Mandarin (Putonghua and Guoyu) as represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet:


Bilabial Labiodental Alveolar Retroflex Alveolo-palatal Velar
Plosive p t k
Nasal m n
Fricative f s ʂ ɕ x
Affricate ts tsʰ tʂʰ tɕʰ
Lateral approximant l
Approximant w ɻ j ʁ


Corresponding chart in:

  • Pinyin
  • Zhuyin
  • Gwoyeu Romatzyh

For more complete information, showing how initials and finals interact. see this Zhuyin-IPA chart. The vowel sounds in that chart have been verified against the official IPA: site.

/j/ and /w/ appear when a rhyme starting with a close vowel, like /i/ or /u/, begins a syllable with no other onset. Some linguists analyze a /ʁ/ when an open vowel like /a/ begins a syllable.

The alveolo-palatal consonants j q x are in complementary distribution (see Minimal pair) with the alveolar consonants z c s, retroflex consonants zh ch sh and velar consonants g k h. As a result, some linguists prefer to classify j q x as allophones of one of the three other sets.

Rhymes

Rhymes are combinations of medial (-i-, -u-, -y-), vowel, and final consonant.

Full rhyme table of Putonghua/Guoyu in IPA:


i u y
ɑ  
ɤ   uo 1  
    2
  uaɪ  
  ueɪ  
iaʊ    
ɤʊ iɤʊ    
an iɛn uan yɛn
ən in uən yn
ɑŋ iɑŋ uɑŋ  
ɤŋ iɤŋ    
    ʊŋ yʊŋ


1 Both pinyin and zhuyin have an additional "o", used after "b p m f", which is distinguished from "uo", used after everything else. "o" is generally put into the first column instead of the third. However, in Beijing pronunciation, these are identical.
2 Another way to represent the four rhymes of this line and the line above is (with the two lines spliced together): "ɯʌ iɛ uɔ yœ". This is much more symmetrical and also reflects Beijing pronunciation.

Same chart, but with -r added (and the corresponding sound changes that take place):


əɻ iəɻ yəɻ
ɑɻ iɑɻ uɑɻ  
ɤɻ   uoɻ  
  iɛɻ   yɛɻ
ɑɻ   uɑɻ  
əɻ   uəɻ  
aʊɻ iaʊɻ    
ɤʊɻ iɤʊɻ    
ɑɻ iɑɻ uɑɻ yɑɻ
əɻ iəɻ uəɻ yəɻ
ɑ̃ɻ iɑ̃ɻ uɑ̃ɻ  
ɤ̃ɻ iɤ̃ɻ    
    ʊ̃ɻ yʊ̃ɻ


Corresponding chart in:

  • Pinyin
  • Zhuyin
  • Gwoyeu Romatzyh

Monophthongs


  Front Central Back
Close • y • u
ɪ
Close-mid ɤ • o̜
 
Open-mid ɛ • ʌ •
 
Open


Tones

Mandarin, like all Chinese dialects, is a tonal language. This means that tone, just like consonants and vowels, are used to distinguish words for each other. The following are the 4 tones of Putonghua/Guoyu:

Tone name Yin Ping Yang Ping Shang Qu
Tone contour 55 35 214 51
Tone 1 2 3 4
  1. First tone, or high-level tone (阴平 yin1 ping2, literal meaning: yin-level):
    a steady high tone, as if it were being sung instead of spoken.
  2. Second tone, or rising tone (阳平 yang2 ping2, literal meaning: yang-level), or linguistically, high-rising:
    is a sound that rises from mid-level tone to high (e.g., What?!)
  3. Third tone (low tone, or low-falling-raising, 上声 shang4 sheng1, literal meaning: "up tone"):
    has a mid-low to low descent, in some contexts then followed by a rising pitch. It is similar to saying "w-e-l-l" thoughtfully or as if inviting an answer.
  4. Fourth tone, falling tone (去声 qu4 sheng1, literal meaning: "away tone"), or high-falling:
    features a sharp downward accent ("dipping") from high to low, and is a shorter tone, similar to curt commands. (e.g., Stop!)

Other pitch shapes sometimes called tones:

  • Fifth tone, or neutral tone or zeroeth tone (轻声 qing1 sheng1, literal meaning: "light tone"):
    All unstressed syllables are pronounced with this "tone", with is sometimes considered as a lack of tone. In most varieties of Mandarin, the second syllable in two-syllable compounds is weaker in tonal prominence than the first character, and is sometimes called a "neutral" tone. On the other hand, if a very unemphasized incorrect tone is produced, its presence may be noted by the careful listener.
  • Entering tone. Middle Chinese had a tone known as the "entering tone". The entering tone has somewhat the sound of an arrow striking and entering a wooden plank, i.e., it is of short duration compared to the other tones, and it ends with either a glottal stop or a consonant. Older dictionaries such as Mathews' Chinese-English Dictionary mark entering tone characters with a superscript 5. The entering tone is kept in some dialects of Mandarin, such as that of Nanjing; however it has been lost for most Mandarin dialects (including that of Beijing), and is hence not used in standard Mandarin.

Most romanizations represent the tones as diacritics on the vowels (e.g., Pinyin, MPS II and Tongyong Pinyin). Zhuyin uses diacritics as well. Others, like Wade-Giles, uses superscript number at the end of each syllable. Representation of Chinese tone marks/numbers is rarely practised outside of textbooks. Gwoyeu Romatzyh is a rare example where tones are not represented as special symbols, but as true alphabet letters (hence creating a very complex orthography).

To listen to the tones, see http://www.wku.edu/~shizhen.gao/Chinese101/pinyin/tones.htm (click on the blue-red yin yang symbol).

Pronunciation also varies with context according to the rules of tone sandhi. The most prominent phenomenon of this kind is when there are two third tones in immediate sequence, in which case the first of them changes to a second tone. If there are three third tones in series, the first may or may not be converted to a second tone, depending on the preference of the speaker and the dialect area.

Relationship between Middle Chinese and modern tones:

V- = unvoiced initial consonant
L = sonorant initial consonant
V+ = voiced initial consonant (not sonorant)

Middle Chinese Tone Ping Shang Qu Ru
Middle Chinese Initial V- L V+ V- L V+ V- L V+ V- L V+
Putonghua Tone name Yin Ping Yang Ping Shang Qu redistributed
with no pattern
to Qu to Yang Ping
Putonghua Tone contour 55 35 214 51 to 51 to 35

Accents in learning foreign languages

The set of syllables in Chinese is very small, since each syllable has to be constructed after the pattern: "optional initial consonant followed by vowel followed by optional nasal". Not every syllable that is possible according to this rule is actually used, and in practice there are only a few hundred syllables. For example, Mandarin totally lacks the ending 'm' sound. People with a heavy Mandarin accent would often read 'time' as 'tie-mm'.

Grammar

See: Chinese grammar

Vocabulary

There are many more words in Mandarin with more than one syllable compared to other varieties of Chinese. This is because Mandarin has undergone many more sound changes than southern varieties of Chinese, and needed to deal with many more homophones — usually by forming new words via compounding. This creates words with more than one syllable. (In contrast, Ancient Chinese had almost no words at all with more than one syllable.)

The pronouns in Mandarin are wǒ (我) "I", nǐ (你) "you", and tā (他/她) "he/she", with -men (们) added for the plural. Dialects of Mandarin agree with each other quite consistently on this, but not with other varieties of Chinese. (e.g. Wu has 侬 "you".)

In addition, there is zánmen (咱们), used to refer to a "we" that includes the listener, and nín (您), a deferential way of saying "you".

Other vocabulary that Mandarin dialects generally tend to share are aspect and mood particles, such as -le (了), -zhe (着), and -guo (过). Other Chinese varieties tend to use different words in some of these contexts (e.g. Cantonese's 咗 and 紧).

Due to its relative proximity with Central Asia, Mandarin has some loanwords from Altaic languages, for example, hútong (胡同) "alley". Southern Chinese tends to have more borrowings from Tai or Austronesian languages.

Adoption of foreign words

Since Chinese has so few syllables, Mandarin speakers typically experience great difficulty in pronouncing words from languages rich in consonant clusters, e.g. most European languages. Additionally, syllables that do not conform to the Mandarin pattern cannot be directly transcribed into Chinese characters. There is an official system for approximating foreign words using Chinese characters, but this sometimes yields strange results and is mainly used for rendering foreign names.

For example, the word "telephone" was loaned as "delüfeng" in the 1920s, but later it was changed to "dianhua" (电话 "electric speech"). On the other hand, the word for "microphone" remains "maikefeng" (although 话筒 "speech tube" is gradually replacing the purely phonetic rendering). Because of the close relationship between written Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji, Mandarin borrowed many Japanese words that had originally been derived from European words in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Because of these transcription difficulties, it is more common to coin new words in Mandarin than to borrow foreign words directly. These new words are usually polysyllabic. Often one syllable conveys the word's "subject". (This is similar to the way in which many individual Chinese characters are composed.)

Since this way of incorporating foreign words is very cumbersome, the Chinese tend to invent their own words for technical innovations (the word for "train" (火車), e.g., means "fire vehicle"); so the international set of technical expressions deriving from Latin and Greek is not found in Mandarin.

Characters which are used exclusively in the transcription of foreign words are present (though not prominently so) in Chinese; many of these characters date back to Middle Chinese wherein they were used to translate Sanskrit phonemes.

Mandarin Chinese and other dialects

Geographical distribution of Mandarin and other Chinese languages.
Enlarge
Geographical distribution of Mandarin and other Chinese languages.

To the dismay of non-Mandarin speakers, the predominant role of Mandarin has led to the misidentification of Mandarin as the only "Chinese language". Although both Mainland China and Taiwan use Mandarin as the official language and promote its nationwide use, there is no official interest or intent in either location to have Mandarin replace local dialect, and as a practical matter, Mandarin is still far from supplanting the local dialects that are in daily use in many locations, particularly in the southern provinces of Mainland China or on Taiwan itself. Speaking only Mandarin in these areas is widely regarded as a significant social handicap; many Chinese language speakers there, particularly the older people, do not speak Mandarin very well or at all.

In the predominantly Han areas in Mainland China, the interaction between Mandarin and the local Chinese dialects has generally not been controversial. Although the use of Mandarin is encouraged as the common working language, the People's Republic of China has attempted to be sensitive to the status of local dialects and has not discouraged their use. One example of this is Mao Zedong himself, who often spoke in Hunanese which is a form of Mandarin in the broad linguistic sense but is quite different than the standardized national language. Many native speakers of Chinese find Mao's spoken language to be largely incomprehensible, even when speaking in formal occasions.

Mandarin, however, is used very commonly for logistical reasons in that it is often the only means of communications between people from different areas. In many parts of southern China, the linguistic diversity is so large that even people from neighboring cities find it difficult to talk to each other in the local form of Chinese, thereby requiring the use of a lingua franca such as Mandarin. Curiously the use of Mandarin in the 20th century has supplanted the use of pidgin English which was used as a common language in some parts of southern China in the 18th and 19th century.

In Taiwan, the relationship between Mandarin and local dialects, particularly Taiwanese has been more heated. Until the 1980s the government attempted to discourage the use of Taiwanese, even portraying it as inferior. This produced a backlash in the 1990s. Although some more extreme supporters of Taiwan independence tend to be opposed to Mandarin in favor of Taiwanese, efforts to replace Mandarin either with Taiwanese or with a multi-lingual standard have remained stalled.

See also:

External links


Chinese: spoken varieties
Subdivisions: Mandarin | Jin | Wu | Hui | Xiang | Gan | Hakka | Yue | Pinghua | Min
Dungan | Danzhouhua | Shaozhou Tuhua | Xianghua
Subdivisions of Min: Min Dong | Min Bei | Min Zhong | Pu Xian | Min Nan | Qiong Wen | Shao Jiang
Note: The above is only one classification scheme among many.
Official spoken varieties: Putonghua (PRC) | Guoyu (ROC) | Cantonese (Hong Kong & Macau)
Historical phonology: Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Proto-Min | Proto-Mandarin | Haner
Chinese: written varieties
Official written varieties: Classical Chinese | Vernacular Chinese


Last updated: 10-24-2004 05:10:45