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Standard Mandarin is the official Chinese spoken language used by the People's Republic of China, the Republic of China (Taiwan), and Singapore. The phonology of Standard Mandarin is based on that of the Beijing dialect, which belongs to Mandarin, a large and very diverse group of Chinese dialects spoken across northern and southwestern China. The vocabulary is largely drawn from this group of dialects. The grammar of Standard Mandarin is standardized to the body of modern works written in Vernacular Chinese, which in practice follows the tradition of the Mandarin group of dialects most closely with some notable exceptions. As a result, Standard Mandarin itself is usually called "Mandarin" in non-academic, everyday usage. However, linguists use "Mandarin" to refer to the entire group of dialects. This convention will be adopted by the rest of this article. Standard Mandarin is officially known in the People's Republic of China as Pǔtōnghuà (, literally "common speech" or "ordinary speech"), in the Republic of China (Taiwan) as Guóyǔ (, literally "national language"), and in Malaysia and Singapore as Huáyǔ (, literally "the Chinese (in a cultural sense) language"). All three terms are used interchangeably in Chinese communities around the world where different groups have come into contact. Standard Mandarin is also known as Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin has more native speakers than any other language. History Since ancient history, the Chinese language has always consisted of a wide variety of dialects; hence prestige dialects and lingua francas have always been needed. Confucius, for example, used yǎyán (), or "elegant speech", rather than colloquial regional dialects; text during the Han Dynasty also referred to tōngyǔ (), or "common language". Rime books, which were written since the Southern and Northern Dynasties, may also have reflected one or more systems of standard pronunciation during those times. However, all of these standard dialects were probably unknown outside the educated elite; even among the elite, pronunciations may have been very different, as the unifying factor of all Chinese dialects, Classical Chinese, was a written standard, not a spoken one. The Ming Dynasty (1368 - 1644) and the Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1912) began to use the term guānhuà (官话), or "official speech", to refer to the speech used at the courts. The term Mandarin comes directly from the Portuguese. The word mandarin was first used to name the Chinese bureaucratic officials (i.e., the mandarins), because the Portuguese, under the misapprehension that the Sanskrit word (mantri or mentri) that was used throughout Asia to denote "an official" had some connection with the Portuguese word mandar (to order somebody to do something), and having obverved that these officials all "issued orders", chose to call them mandarins. From this, the Portuguese immediately started calling the special language that these officials spoke amongst themselves (i.e., Guanhua) "the language of the mandarins", "the mandarin language" or, simply, "Mandarin". The fact that Guanhua was, to a certain extent, an artificial language, based upon a set of conventions (i.e., Northern Chinese family of languages for grammar and meaning, and the specific pronunciation of the Imperial Court's locale for its utterance), is precisely what makes it such an appropriate term for Modern Standard Chinese (i.e., Northern Chinese family of languages for grammar and meaning, and the specific pronunciation of Beijing for its utterance). It seems that during the early part of this period, the standard was based on the Nanjing dialect, but later the Beijing dialect became increasingly influential, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various dialects in the capital, Beijing. In the 17th century, the Empire had set up Orthoepy Academies (正音書院, Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) in an attempt to make pronunciation conform to the Beijing standard. But these attempts had little success. As late as the 19th century the emperor had difficulty understanding some of his own ministers in court, who did not always try to follow any standard pronunciation. Nevertheless, by 1909, the dying Qing Dynasty had established the Beijing dialect as guóyǔ (国语), or the "national language". After the Republic of China was established in 1912, there was more success in promoting a common national language. A Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation was convened with delegates from the entire country. At first there was an attempt to introduce a standard pronunciation with elements from regional dialects. But this was deemed too difficult to promote, and in 1924 this attempt was abandoned and the Beijing dialect became the major source of standard national pronunciation, due to the status of that dialect as a prestigious dialect since the Qing Dynasty. Elements from other dialects continue to exist in the standard language, but as exceptions rather than the rule. The People's Republic of China, established in 1949, continued the effort. In 1955, standard Mandarin was renamed pǔtōnghuà (普通话), or "common speech". (The name change was not recognized by the Republic of China which has governed only Taiwan and some surrounding islands since 1949.) Since then, the standards used in mainland China and Taiwan have diverged somewhat. After the handovers of Hong Kong * and Macau, the term pǔtōnghuà is used in those Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China, and the pinyin system is widely used. In both mainland China and Taiwan, the use of Standard Mandarin as the medium of instruction in the educational system and in the media has contributed to the spread of standard Mandarin. As a result, Standard Mandarin is now spoken fluently by most people in Mainland China and in Taiwan. However in Hong Kong, due to historical and linguistic reasons, the language of education and both formal and informal speech remains the local Standard Cantonese but standard Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential. The advent of the 20th century has seen many profound changes in Standard Mandarin. Many polite and humble words that were in use in imperial China have almost entirely disappeared in daily conversation in modern-day Standard Mandarin, such as jiàn (贱 "my humble") and guì (贵 "your honorable"). Phonology The standardized phonology of Standard Mandarin is reproduced below. Actual reproduction varies widely among speakers, as everyone (including national leaders) inadvertently introduces elements of his/her own native dialect. By contrast, television and radio announcers are usually chosen for their pronunciation accuracy. Below is the phonology of Standard Mandarin. Initials The following is the initial inventory of Standard Mandarin as represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA): 1 is often transcribed as (a voiced retroflex fricative). This represents a variation in pronunciation among different speakers, rather than two different phonemes. Corresponding chart in: 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. A table of valid initial and final combinations can also be seen at: What are traditionally termed retroflex are phonetically not true retroflex articulations. These consonants are, rather, flat apical postalveolar, and thus differ from both palatoalveolar and (true) retroflex consonants (Ladefoged & Wu 1984; Ladefoged & Maddieson 1996:150-154). The alveolo-palatal consonants are in complementary distribution (see minimal pair) with the alveolar consonants , retroflex consonants and velar consonants . As a result, linguists prefer to classify as allophones of one of the three other sets. The Yale and Wade-Giles systems, for example, mostly treat the palatals as allophones of the retroflex consonants; Tongyong Pinyin mostly treats them as allophones of the dentals; and Chinese Braille treats them as allophones of the velars. is commonly pronounced (a labiodental approximant) by speakers around Beijing; this may be considered substandard, but it nevertheless occurs frequently. may be pronounced as , which is characteristic of the speech of young women, and also of some men. This is usually considered rather effeminate and may also be considered substandard. Finals The final, or rime, of a syllable, in Standard Mandarin, is the part after the initial consonant. A Mandarin final can be structurally described as (Vm)V(Cf). In other words, it consists of an optional medial, a nucleus, and an optional coda. When present, the medial can be one of the three glides corresponding to the three high vowels: , , . The coda can be absent; it can be one of two glides: and ; or it can be one of two nasals: , . Not counting tone distinctions, there are about 35 distinct finals in Mandarin. There are at least the following phones: This shows fourteen different vowels. By very conservative standards, this represents a system of eight phonemes: /a/ (a/), /e/ (e/), /o/ (o/), (/), (), /i/, /u/ (/u), and /y/. Further reduction can be achieved by noticing that /e/, /o/, and are in complementary distribution, and can be treated as a single phoneme (except in the isolated words and , which function only as exclamations and can be treated as outside of the core system, similar to the normal treatment of "hmm", "unh-unh", "shhh!" and other English exclamations that violate usual syllabic constraints). Note also that the finals can be considered to be phonemically either or ; likewise for , which can be either or . (Taking into account that and become and upon rhotacization, the former interpretation seems more likely.) It would also be possible to merge and , provided that the palatal and retroflex series are not themselves merged, since /i/ does not occur after retroflex or velar sounds or after dental fricatives and affricates. If all of these suggestions are followed, and and considered to be and , the resulting system of , , , , and is much like the standard Pinyin romanization scheme (except that Pinyin does not merge with and uses a certain number of shortcut spellings). An even more reduced system results from considering main vowel , and to be the surface results of the respective glides combined with a null meta-phoneme. This system, shown below, analyzes the final part of a syllable as a combination of a glide slot (, , or null), a main vowel slot (, or null), and a coda slot (, , , or null). (The minimal vowel ( or ) is considered to be the surface manifestation when all three slots are null, rather than an allophone of main vowel .) When the medial, nucleus, and coda combine into a final, their pronunciations may be affected. The following is the full table of finals of Standard Mandarin in IPA: 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 finals of this line is: , which reflects Beijing pronunciation. ³ is pronounced when it follows an initial. Corresponding chart in: A table of valid initial and final combinations can also be seen at: Retroflex Finals Standard Mandarin also uses a rhotic consonant, . There are two cases in which it is used: The basic rules controlling the surface pronunciation of a final plus are as follows: The following chart shows how the finals from the above chart are affected by the addition of this suffix: The behavior of retroflexed finals provides some evidence for the phonemic analysis of main vowels. The fact that and become and confirms their analysis as /ian/ and /yan/ (rather than and ), and the differing behavior of and i suggests that these should not be merged (contrary to Pinyin). The behavior of and , however, is problematic, since it suggests that they should not be merged, contrary to most analyses. (An alternative, consistent with retroflex behavior, would be to merge and as a single phoneme and maintain as a separate phoneme occurring only in a single final. Some evidence for this comes from standard Beijing pronunciation, where and are simple vowels but "" is actually a complex diphthong, pronounced approximately as -- a combination of the vowels in Standard American "put" and "putt"}}.) Tones
Romanization In the 1920s Hu Shih, a strong advocate of vernacular Chinese (or baihua) literature, expressed the view that alphabetic writing, introduced in two stages, would be the key to mass literacy: "I think China will have to have an alphabetic writing in the future. But there are too many monosyllables in the literary language, and it would be impossible to change over to an alphabetic script. So it is necessary first to replace the literary style with the báihwà style, and after that to change from báihwà writing to alphabetic writing. In 1940, Mao Zedong wrote: …our script must be reformed under certain conditions, and our language must be brought closer to that of the masses. In 1951, Mao demanded that the Committee for Research into Language Reform set about devising a totally indigenous phonetic system: Our written language must be reformed. It should take the direction of phoneticization, common to all the languages of the world; it must be national in form; the alphabet and the projects should be elaborated on the basis of the existing Chinese characters. Although the term "romanization" is rather misleading in the context of the "phoneticization" of Chinese languages -- because many of the methods that have been proposed to systematically write Chinese sounds have not employed the Latin alphabet -- the term is now universally used by convention. While the Chinese and the non-Chinese romanization projects were driven by entirely different needs (and operated in entirely different circumstances), each has had an enormous influence upon the other. Despite the constant assertions that "the difficulty of the traditional Chinese writing system was largely responsible for the high rate of illiteracy in China, which in turn accounted for the country's weakness and ineptitude in the face of foreign powers", and the extent to which "these assumptions have been part of the foundation underlying the whole process of script reform since the 1890s", and the extent to which these assertions are now universally accepted as being self-evident, established fact, it is highly significant that none of these claims have ever been tested or proved (Chen, 1999, p.166). The non-Chinese need From the time the first Westerners entered China there has been an ever-increasing need for systematic, coherent mechanisms: The Chinese need The Indian, Sanskrit grammarians who came to China two thousand years ago to work on the translation of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese and the transliteration of Buddhist terms into Chinese, discovered the "initial sound", "final sound", and "suprasegmental tone” structure of spoken Chinese syllables. This understanding is reflected in the precise Fanqie system, and it is the core principle of all of the modern systems of rendering correct Chinese pronunciation. Yet, whilst the Fanqie system was ideal for indicating the conventional pronunciation of single, isolated characters in written, Classical Chinese literature, it was quite unworkable in relation to the pronunciation of essentially polysyllabic, colloquial spoken Chinese languages, such as Mandarin. By contrast with the needs of "Western" users, the Chinese had seven entirely different domains of need for an efficient, simple and coherent system of "romanization": (1) An auxiliary phonetic system for fully literate speakers of Mandarin, to allow them to easily identify the specific pronunciation for a character within a specific context -- such as with 行: xíng (to walk; behaviour, conduct) or háng (a store) -- and, as a consequence, any auxiliary phonetic system had to be able to be written (a) vertically down the page, (b) right-to-left, and (c) left-to-right. (2) A phonetic system to provide fully literate speakers of another mutually unintelligible Chinese language, such as Cantonese, with a mechanism to enable them to recite a Chinese text in Mandarin. (3) As an auxiliary phonetic system to guide native-speaker-of-Mandarin students who were learning either Classical or Modern Chinese. (4) An alternative phonetic system for fully literate speakers of Mandarin who needed to operate technical equipment (telegraphic equipment, telex machines, typewriters, teleprinters, linotype machines, etc.) per medium of a standard QWERTY keyboard. (5) As a systematic mechanism for entirely superseding the need for Chinese written characters, and facilitating some level of functional literacy amongst native speakers of Mandarin who could not read Chinese characters, especially to meet the needs of mass education and industrial expansion. (6) A system to facilitate the indexing of books, and cataloguing in general, and to make dictionaries far easier to consult. (7) A phonetic system that would reduce the significant difficulties faced by foreigners attempting to learn to speak, read and write Chinese. Romanization systems Wade-Giles The first system to be widely accepted was the (1859) system of the British diplomat Thomas Wade, which was revised and improved by Herbert Giles into the (1892) Wade-Giles system. Apart from the correction of a number of ambiguities and inconsistencies within the Wade system, the innovation of the Wade-Giles system was that it also indicated tones. A major drawback of the Wade-Giles system was that it demanded the use of apostrophes, additional markings over individual letters (such as ê and ü), and superscript digits (such as Ch'üeh4); all of which, despite their crucial significance, were often omitted in texts -- and, as a consequence, in the absence of matched character(s), the "Chinese" syllable delivered no meaning at all. Postal System The Chinese Postal Map Romanization, which was standardized in 1906, was based on French styles of romanization, and was exclusively used for place names. Yale system The Yale Romanization system was created at Yale University during World War II specifically to facilitate communication between American military personnel and their Chinese counterparts. Although the Yale system has been entirely superseded by the Chinese Hanyu Pinyin system, it is important to understand that the Yale system -- which uses a more direct representation of the phonemes of Mandarin than the other systems of its day -- survived far beyond its natural "use-by-date" for at least three significant reasons: (1) It was ideal for phrase-book usage. (2) It was inextricably linked to the Yale system of teaching Chinese. The Yale system taught Mandarin through teaching the patterns of the spoken, colloquial Chinese language. All other available systems taught Mandarin as if (a) it was a written language, and (b) it followed the rules of Latin grammar. The Yale system was, at the time of its creation (and for maybe the next 20 years), the most successful system of teaching Mandarin in terms of students' development of correct speaking skills, and the speed of their language acquisition, and the degree to which they retained their skills and vocabulary. (3) For a considerable period of time in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in countries such as Australia, the UK, and the U.S.A., a decision to study either Mandarin or Classical Chinese also meant making a very political choice. One had to choose between learning either simple or traditional characters and, as well, choose between using either the Hanyu Pinyin or Gwoyeu Romatzyh systems of romanization; and, in the process, seem to pro-actively align oneself with either the Beijing-centred CCP or the Taipei-centred KMT respectively. The fact that there were also (a) large expatriate Chinese communities with various strongly-held political positions, and (b) Western academics with strong allegiances to one side or the other, meant that the choice of the "neutral" Yale textbooks (such as those produced by John DeFrancis), the "neutral" Yale teaching system (which was, at the time, the best in the English-speaking world), and the "neutral" Yale Romanization system kept one immune from harmful, career threatening, and otherwise counterproductive criticism. Hanyu Pinyin Whilst the Wade, Wade-Giles, and Postal systems still appear in the European literature, they generally only appear within a passage cited from an earlier work. It is now almost universal for texts in all European languages to employ the Chinese Hanyu Pinyin system (usually without tone marks) in the form adopted by the PRC government in 1979. Qieyin Xinzi The first modern indigenous Chinese romanization system, the Qieyin Xinzi ("New Phonetic Alphabet "), was developed in 1892 by Lu Zhuangzhang (盧戇章) (1854-1928). It was used to write the sounds of the Xiamen dialect of the Southern Min language. Zhuyin Fuhao Wu Jingheng (吳敬恆) (who had developed a "beansprout alphabet") and Wang Zhao (王照) (who had developed a Mandarin alphabet, "Guanhua Zimu", in 1900), and Lu Zhuangzhang were part of the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation (1912-1913), which developed the rudimentary Jiyin Zimu (記音字母) system of Zhang Binglin into the Mandarin-specific phonetic system now known as the Zhuyin Fuhao (注音符號), or Bopomofo system, that was eventually proclaimed on 23 November 1918. The significant feature of the Zhuyin Fuhao system is that it is comprised entirely of "ruby characters" which can be written beside any Chinese text regardless of whether the characters appear vertically, right-to-left, or left-to-right. Gwoyeu Romatzyh In 1923, the KMT's Ministry of Education instituted a National Language Unification Commission which, in turn, formed an 11-member romanization unit. The political circumstances of the time prevented any positive outcome from the formation of this unit. A new voluntary working subcommittee was independently formed by a group of five scholars who strongly advocated romanization. The committee, which met 22 times over a 12 month period (1925-1926), was comprised of Zhao Yuanren, Lin Yutang, Qian Xuantong, Li Jinxi (黎锦熙), and one Wang Yi. The group developed the Gwoyeu Romatzyh system that was proclaimed on 26 September 1928. The most distinctive aspect of this new system was that, rather than relying upon marks or numbers, it indicated the tonal variations of the "root syllable" by a systematic variation within the spelling of the syllable itself. This also meant that the entire system could be written with the characters on a standard QWERTY keyboard. …the call to abolish the written characters in favour of a romanized alphabet reached a peak around 1923. As almost all of the designers of Gwoyeu Romatzyh were ardent supporters of this radical view, it is only natural that, aside from serving the immediate auxiliary role of sound annotation, etc., their scheme was designed in such a way that it would be capable of serving all functions expected of a bonafide writing system, and supersede the written Chinese characters in due course. Despite the fact that it was created to eventually replace Chinese characters altogether, and that it was constructed by linguists, the Gwoyeu Romatzyh system was never extensively used for any purpose other than delivering the pronunciation of a specific Chinese written character in dictionaries. And, whilst the "within syllable" indication of the tone made sense to Western users, the complexity of its tonal system was such that it was never popular with Chinese users. Latinxua Sinwenz The work towards constructing the Latinxua Sinwenz system began in Moscow as early as 1928 when the Soviet "Scientific Research Institute on China" sought to create a means through which the large Chinese population living in the far eastern region of the U.S.S.R. could be made literate, facilitating their further education. This was significantly different from all other romanization schemes in that, from the very outset, it was intended that the Latinxua Sinwenz system, once established, would supersede the Chinese characters. They decided to use the Latin alphabet because they thought that it would serve their purpose better than the Cyrillic alphabet. Unlike the Gwoyeu Romatzyh system, with its complex method of indicating tones, the Latinxua Sinwenz system does not indicate tones at all; yet, unlike the Gwoyeu Romatzyh system, it was not Mandarin-specific and, therefore could be used for other Chinese languages and their dialects. The eminent Moscow-based Chinese scholar Qu Qiubai (1899-1935) and the Russian linguist V.S. Kolokolov (1896-1979) devised a prototype romanization system in 1929. In 1931 a coordinated effort between the Soviet sinologists B.M. Alekseev, A.A. Dragunov and A.G. Shrprintsin, and the Moscow-based Chinese scholars Qu Qiubai, Wu Yuzhang, Lin Boqu (林伯渠), Xiao San, Wang Xiangbao, and Xu Teli established the Latinxua Sinwenz system. The system was supported by a number of Chinese intellectuals such as Guo Moruo and Lu Xun, and trials were conducted amongst the 100,000 Chinese immigrant workers living in the Soviet Union for about four years and later, in 1940-1942, in the communist-controlled Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Region of China. In November 1949, the railways in China's north-east adopted the Latinxua Sinwenz system for all their telecommunications. For a time, the system was very important in spreading literacy in Northern China; and more than 300 publications totalling half a million issues appeared in Latinxua Sinwenz. However: In 1944 the latinization movement was officially curtailed in the communist-controlled areas of China on the pretext that there were insufficient trained cadres capable of teaching the system. It is more likely that, as the communists prepared to take power in a much wider territory, they had second thoughts about the rhetoric that surrounded the latinization movement; in order to obtain the maximum popular support, they withdrew support from a movement that deeply offended many supporters of the traditional writing system. Hanyu Pinyin In October 1949, the Association for Reforming the Chinese Written Language was established. Wu Yuzhang (one of the creators of the Latinxua Sinwenz system) was appointed Chairman. All of the members of its initial governing body belonged to either the Latinxua Sinwenz movement (Ni Haishu (倪海曙), Lin Handa (林汉达), etc.) or the Gwoyeu Romatzyh movement (Li Jinxi (黎锦熙), Luo Changpei (羅常培), etc.); and, for the most part, they were also highly trained linguists. Its first task (1949-1952) was to take "the phonetic project adopting the Latin alphabet" as "the main object of its research". In a speech delivered on 10 January 1958, Zhou Enlai observed that the Committee had spent three years in an earnest attempt to create a non-Latin Chinese phonetic alphabet (they had also attempted to adapt the Zhuyin Fuhao system); however "no satisfactory result could be obtained", and "the Latin alphabet was then adopted". He also emphatically stated: In future, we shall adopt the Latin alphabet for the Chinese phonetic alphabet. Being in wide use in scientific and technological fields and in constant day-to-day usage, it will be easily remembered. The adoption of such an alphabet will, therefore, greatly facilitate the popularization of the common speech i.e. Putonghua. The development of the Hanyu Pinyin system -- from Mao's 1951 directive, through the promulgation on 1 November 1957 of a draft version by the State Council, to its final form being approved by the State Council in September 1978, culminating in the 1982 decision by the International Organization for Standardization to accept the Hanyu Pinyin system as the standard for transcribing Chinese -- is a complex process involving decision-making on a number of extremely volatile issues, including: The movement for language reform came to a standstill during the Cultural Revolution; and nothing was published on language reform or linguistics from 1966 to 1972. The Pinyin subtitles that had first appeared on the masthead of the People's Daily newspaper and the Hong Qi ("Red Flag ") Journal in 1958 did not appear at all between July 1966 and January 1977. In its final form, the Hanyu Pinyin system: (a) was used to indicate pronunciation only, (b) was exclusively based on the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect, (c) included tone marks, (d) embodied the traditional "initial sound", "final sound", and "suprasegmental tone” model, and (e) was written in the Latin alphabet. Despite the fact that the "Draft Scheme for a Chinese Phonetic Alphabet" published in "People's China" on 16 March 1956 contained certain unusual and peculiar characters, the Committee for Research into Language Reform soon reverted to the Latin Alphabet, citing the following reasons: (1) The Latin alphabet is extensively used by scientists regardless of their native tongue, and technical terms are frequently written in Latin. (2) The Latin alphabet is simple to write and easy to read. It has beeen used for centuries all over the world. It is easily adaptable to the task of recording Chinese pronunciation. (3) Whilst the use of the Cyrillic alphabet would strengthen ties with the U.S.S.R., the Latin alphabet is familiar to most Russian students, and its use would strengthen the ties between China and many of its Southeast Asian neighbours who are already familiar with the Latin alphabet. (4) As a response to Mao Zedong's remark that "cultural patriotism" should be a "weighty factor" in the choice of an alphabet, despite the fact that the Latin alphabet is "foreign" it will serve as a strong tool for economic and industrial expansion; and, moreover, the fact that two of the most patriotic Chinese, Qu Qiubai and Lu Xun, were such strong advocates of the Latin alphabet indicates that the choice does not indicate any lack of patriotism. (5) On the basis that the British, French, Germans, Spanish, Polish and Czechoslovakians have all modified the Latin alphabet for their own usage, and because the Latin alphabet is derived from the Greek alphabet, which, in turn came from Phoenecian and Egyptian, there as much shame attached to using the Latin alphabet as there is in using Arabic numerals and the conventional mathematical symbols, regardless of their point of origin. The position in Taiwan The Zhuyin Fuhao system is used for teaching the pronunciation of characters and compounds in schools. Efforts to phase out this system in favor of Tongyong Pinyin have 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. A variety of transcription systems are used on Taiwan, in a situation that has often been politicised. 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. Taipei City's mayor and current leader of the mildly pro-unification opposition party Kuomintang, Ma Ying-jeou, adopted Hanyu Pinyin for the street names of Taipei, as well as for the Taipei Rapid Transit System (which extends into Taipei County, controlled by the ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party). This has resulted in protests accusing Ma of failing to consult and showing disrespect to the Taipei County Government, as well as disregarding central language policies. Standard Mandarin and Beijing dialect By the official definition of the People's Republic of China, standard Mandarin uses: In theory the Republic of China defines standard Mandarin differently, though in reality the differences are minor and are concentrated mostly in the tones of a small minority of words. Although Chinese speakers make a clear distinction between Standard Mandarin and the Beijing dialect, there are aspects of Beijing dialect that have made it into the official standard. Standard Mandarin has a T-V distinction between the polite and informal versions of you that comes from Beijing dialect. In addition, there is a distinction between "zánmen" (we including the listener) and "wǒmen" (we not including the listener). In practice, neither distinction is commonly used by most Chinese. Standard Mandarin and other dialects The national standard can be very different from a local Mandarin speech, to the point of being unintelligible. In addition, since standard Mandarin is spoken as a second language across most of China, it is also very common for two people who both believe themselves to be speaking Chinese to require a translator. Nevertheless, efforts by the PRC, ROC, and Singapore to promote standard Mandarin as the standard tongue have greatly boosted the number of standard Mandarin speakers. To the dismay of non-Mandarin speakers, the predominant role of standard Mandarin has led to the common misidentification of Mandarin as the only "Chinese language". Although both Mainland China and Taiwan use standard Mandarin as the official language and Mainland China is keen to promote its nationwide use as a national language of communication, there is hardly any official intent in either location to have standard Mandarin replace local dialects, and as a practical matter, standard Mandarin still does not supplant the local dialects that are in use, particularly in the southern provinces of Mainland China or on Taiwan. Speaking only standard Mandarin in these areas is sometimes regarded as a significant social handicap; some Chinese language speakers there, particularly the elderly, while having no problem understanding do not speak standard Mandarin fluently. This situation appears to be changing, though, especially in large urban centers, as social changes, migrations, and urbanization take place. In the predominantly Han areas in Mainland China, the interaction between standard Mandarin and the local Chinese dialects has generally not been controversial. Although the use of standard 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 Xiang, a category of Chinese that does not even fall within the wider category of regional Mandarin dialects. Many native speakers of Chinese find Mao's spoken language to be largely incomprehensible, even when speaking in formal occasions. Standard 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 standard Mandarin. Curiously the use of standard 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 standard Mandarin and local dialects, particularly Taiwanese, has been more heated. Following the Kuomintang (KMT) retreat to Taiwan in 1949 and until the lifting of martial law in the 1980s, the ROC government discouraged the use of Taiwanese and other vernaculars, portraying them as inferior. The Kuomintang was composed of mainland Chinese people who could not speak Taiwanese. Although they were the minority, because the mainland Chinese people were the only type of people in the early ROC government, they were able to setup laws and regulations to curb the speaking of Taiwanese languages. For example, in public places or in schools, the KMT forbid the speaking of Taiwanese. This produced a backlash in the 1990s. Although some more extreme supporters of Taiwan independence tend to be opposed to standard Mandarin in favor of Taiwanese, efforts to replace standard Mandarin either with Taiwanese or with a multi-lingual standard have remained stalled. However, currently in schools, Taiwanese languages are being taught as an individual class, with dedicated textbooks and course material. The president, Chen Shui-Bian breaks into Taiwanese during his speeches. The former president, Lee Teng-hui when interviewed in the media, also speaks Taiwanese when replying to interviewers. In Singapore, the government has heavily promoted a "Speak Mandarin" campaign to adopt a common language among its diverse Chinese population. The use of non-Mandarin dialects in broadcast media is prohibited and the use of dialect in any context is officially discouraged. This has led to some resentment, as Singapore's Chinese community is almost entirely of southern Chinese descent and thus considers Mandarin a foreign language. Lee Kuan Yew, the initiator of the campaign, himself admitted that to Singaporeans, Mandarin was a "stepmother tongue" rather than a true mother language. Nevertheless, he saw the need for a unified Chinese language among the Chinese Singaporean community, and closed down the dialect-teaching Chinese schools and banned dialects from broadcast (except while he was campaigning politically). Note that while the term Hànyǔ (漢語; simplified: 汉语), or "the Han Chinese language", is sometimes used to refer to just standard Mandarin, it is more precisely used to refer to all variants of Chinese, since they are, after all, all spoken by Han Chinese. A common claim, made by speakers of many other dialects such as Hakka and Cantonese, is that their own dialect is the "true" Hanyu, because its grammar is "closer" to that of classical Chinese. See also: Accents Most Chinese (Beijingers included) speak Standard Mandarin with elements of their own dialects (i.e. their "accents") mixed in. For example, natives of Beijing, add a final "er" () — commonly used as a diminutive — sound to vocabulary items that other speakers would leave unadorned (兒音/儿音; pinyin: éryīn). On the other hand, speakers from northeastern and southern China as well as Taiwan often mix up zh and z, ch and c, sh and s, h and f, and l and n because their own home dialects often do not make these distinctions. See List of Chinese dialects for a list of articles on individual Chinese dialects and how their features differ from Standard Mandarin. Role of standard Mandarin From an official point of view, standard Mandarin is theoretically something like a lingua franca — a way for speakers of the many mutually unintelligible Han Chinese dialects/languages, as well as the Han and non-Han ethnic groups to communicate with each other. The very name of "Putonghua", or "common speech", reinforces this idea. In practice, however, due to standard Mandarin being a lingua franca and a "public" language, other languages or dialects, both Han and non-Han, have shown signs of losing ground to standard Mandarin, to the chagrin of many local culture proponents. On Taiwan, Guoyu (national language) continues to be the official term for standard Mandarin. The term Guoyu is rarely used in Mainland China, because declaring a Beijing-dialect-based standard to be the national language would be deemed unfair to other Chinese dialects and ethnic minorities. The term Putonghua (ordinary speech), on the contrary, implies nothing more than the notion of a lingua franca. However, Guoyu does persist among many older Mainland Chinese, and it is common in U.S. Chinese communities, even among Mainlanders. Some in Taiwan, especially proponents of Taiwan independence, also object to the term Guoyu to refer to standardized Mandarin, on the grounds that the "nation" referred to in the name of the language is China and that Taiwan is or should be independent. They prefer to refer to Mandarin with the terms "Beijing dialect" or Zhongwen (writing of China). As with most things political in Taiwan, some support the name for precisely the same reasons that others oppose them. In December 2004, the first survey of language use in the People's Republic of China revealed that only 53% of its population, about 700 million people, could communicate in Standard Mandarin. (China Daily) A survey whose results were released in September 2006 gave the same result.(South China Morning Post) See also Notes | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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