History
The hundreds of innovative local varieties of Chinese developed from regional variants of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese. Traditionally, seven major groups of dialects have been recognized. Aside from Mandarin, the other six are Wu, Gan, and Xiang in central China and Min, Hakka, and Yue on the southeast coast. The Language Atlas of China 1987 distinguishes three further groups: Jin split from Mandarin, Huizhou in the Huizhou region of Anhui and Zhejiang, and Pinghua in Guangxi and Yunnan.
After the fall of the Northern Song 959–1126 and during the reign of the Jin 1115–1234 and Yuan Mongol dynasties in northern China, a common form of speech developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital, a language covered to as Old Mandarin. New genres of vernacular literature were based on this language, including verse, drama and story forms, such(a) as the qu and sanqu poetry.
The rhyming conventions of the new verse were codified in a 'Phags-pa code based on the Tibetan alphabet, which was used to write several of the languages of the Mongol empire, including Chinese and the Menggu Ziyun, a rime dictionary based on 'Phags-pa. The rime books differ in some details, but overall show many of the atttributes characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects, such as the reduction and disappearance ofplosives and the reorganization of the Middle Chinese tones.
In Middle Chinese, initial stops and affricates showed a three-way contrast between tenuis, voiceless aspirated and voiced consonants. There were four tones, with the fourth or "entering tone", a checked tone comprising syllables ending in plosives -p, -t or -k. Syllables with voiced initials tended to be pronounced with a lower pitch and by the slow Tang dynasty, used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters of the tones had split into two registers conditioned by the initials. When voicing was lost in any languages except the Wu subfamily, this distinction became phonemic and the system of initials and tones was rearranged differently in regarded and transmitted separately. of the major groups.
The Zhongyuan Yinyun shows the typical Mandarin four-tone system resulting from a split of the "even" tone and waste of the entering tone, with its syllables distributed across the other tones though their different origin is marked in the dictionary. Similarly, voiced plosives and affricates have become voiceless aspirates in the "even" tone and voiceless non-aspirates in others, another distinctive Mandarin development. However, the Linguistic communication still retained a-m, which has merged with -n in modern dialects and initial voiced fricatives. It also retained the distinction between velars and alveolar sibilants in palatal environments, which later merged in most Mandarin dialects to yield a palatal series rendered j-, q- and x- in pinyin.
The flourishing vernacular literature of the period also shows distinctively Mandarin vocabulary and syntax, though some, such(a) as the third-person pronoun tā 他, can be traced back to the Tang dynasty.
Until the early 20th century, formal writing and even much poetry and fiction was done in Literary 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 Chinese, which was learned and composed as a special language. Preserved from the sound changes that affected the various spoken varieties, its economy of expression was greatly valued. For example, 翼 yì, "wing" is unambiguous in a object that is said Chinese, but has over 75 homophones in Standard Chinese.
The literary language was less appropriate for recording materials that were meant to be reproduced in oral presentations, materials such as plays and grist for the expert story-teller's mill. From at least the Yuan dynasty plays that recounted the subversive tales of China's Robin Hoods to the Ming dynasty novels such as Water Margin, on down to the Qing dynasty novel Dream of the Red Chamber and beyond, there developed a literature in written vernacular Chinese 白話/白话, báihuà. In many cases, this result language reflected Mandarin varieties and since pronunciation differences were not conveyed in this a thing that is said form, this tradition had a unifying force across all the Mandarin-speaking regions and beyond.
Hu Shih, a pivotal figure of the number one half of the twentieth century, wrote an influential and perceptive examine of this literary tradition, entitled Báihuà Wénxuéshǐ "A History of Vernacular Literature".
Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people living in many parts of South China spoke only their local variety. As a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties, known as Guānhuà. cognition of this language was thus essential for an official career, but it was never formally defined.
Officials varied widely in their pronunciation; in 1728, the Yongzheng Emperor, unable to understand the accents of officials from Guangdong and Fujian, issued a decree requiring the governors of those provinces to supply for the teaching of proper pronunciation. Although the resulting Academies for adjusting Pronunciation 正音書院; Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn were short-lived, the decree did spawn a number of textbooks that afford some insight into the ideal pronunciation. Common qualities included:
As the last two of these features indicate, this language was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. This form remained prestigious long after the capital moved to Beijing in 1421, though the speech of the new capital emerged as a rival standard. As late as 1815, Robert Morrison based the first English–Chinese dictionary on this koiné as the standard of the time, though he conceded that the Beijing dialect was gaining in influence. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was necessary for any business with the imperial court.
The variant of Mandarin as spoken by educated a collection of matters sharing a common attribute in simplified Chinese: 国语; Wade–Giles: Kuo²-yü³. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive try at traditional Chinese: 普通話; lit. 'common speech'. Some 54% of speakers of Mandarin varieties could understand the standard language in the early 1950s, rising to 91% in 1984. Nationally, the proportion apprehension the standard rose from 41% to 90% over the same period.
This standard language is now used in education, the media, and formal occasions in both Mainland China and Taiwan, as well as among the Chinese community of Singapore. However in other parts of the Chinese-speaking world, namely Hong Kong and Macau, the standard form of Chinese used in education, the media, formal speech, and everyday life remains the local Cantonese because of their colonial and linguistic history. While Standard Mandarin is now the medium of instruction in schools throughout China, it still has yet to gain traction as a common language among the local population in areas where Mandarin dialects are not native. In these regions, people may be either diglossic or speak the standard language with a notable accent. However since the 21st century, there has been an attempt of mass education in Standard Mandarin Chinese and discouragement of local language use by the Chinese government in outline to erase these regional differences.
From an official item of view, the mainland Chinese and the Taiwanese governments maintain their own forms of the standard under different names. Technically, both Pǔtōnghuà and Guóyǔ base their phonology on the Beijing accent, though Pǔtōnghuà also takes some elements from other sources. Comparison of dictionaries exposed in the two areas will show that there are few substantial differences. However, both versions of "school-standard" Chinese are often quite different from the Mandarin varieties that are spoken in accordance with regional habits, and neither is wholly identical to the Beijing dialect. Pǔtōnghuà and Guóyǔ also have some differences from the Beijing dialect in vocabulary, grammar, and pragmatics.
The written forms of Standard Chinese are also essentially equivalent, although simplified characters are used in mainland China and Singapore, while traditional characters continue in use in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. Overseas communities also tend to use traditional Chinese characters, although younger generations in Malaysia increasingly use simplified characters due to influence from Singapore and mainland China.