Kouan-houa
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- This article is on all of the Northern and Southwestern Chinese dialects. For the standardized official spoken Chinese language (Putonghua/Guoyu), see Standard Mandarin.
| Mandarin 官話 Guānhuà |
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|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | China (the People's Republic of China) | |
| Region: | Most of northern and southwestern China | |
| Total speakers: | 867.2 million | |
| Ranking: | 1 | |
| Language family: | Sino-Tibetan Chinese Mandarin |
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| Official status | ||
| Official language of: | In standardized form: PRC, ROC, Singapore, United Nations | |
| Regulated by: | In standardized form: In the PRC: various agencies in the ROC: Mandarin Promotion Council in Singapore: Promote Mandarin Council/Speak Mandarin Campaign [1] |
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| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | zh | |
| ISO 639-2: | chi (B) | zho (T) |
| ISO 639-3: | cmn | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Mandarin (Traditional Chinese: 官話; Simplified Chinese: 官话; pinyin: Guānhuà; literally "speech of officials"), or Beifanghua (Simplified Chinese: 北方话; Traditional Chinese: 北方話; pinyin: Běifānghuà; literally "Northern Dialect(s)"), is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. When taken as a separate language, as is often done in academic literature, the Mandarin dialects have more speakers than any other language.
In English, Mandarin can refer to two distinct concepts:
- to Standard Chinese or Standard Mandarin (Putonghua/Guoyu/Huayu), which is based on the particular Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing. Standard Mandarin functions as the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China, the official language of the Republic of China (Taiwan), and one of the four official languages of Singapore. "Chinese" — in practice Standard Mandarin — is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. This standardized version of Mandarin is dealt with in the article Standard Mandarin.
- to all of the Mandarin dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China. This group of dialects is the focus of this article.
In everyday use, "Mandarin" refers usually to just Standard Mandarin (Putonghua/Guoyu). In its broader sense, Mandarin is a diverse group of related dialects, some less mutually intelligible than others. It is a grouping defined and used mainly by linguists, and is not commonly used outside of academic circles as a self-description. Instead, when asked to describe the spoken form they are using, Chinese speaking a form of non-Standard Mandarin will describe the variant that they are speaking, for example Sichuan dialect or Northeast China dialect, and consider it distinct from "Standard Mandarin" (putonghua); they may not recognize that it is in fact classified by linguists as a form of "Mandarin" in a broader sense. Nor is there a common "Mandarin" identity based on language; rather, there are strong regional identities centered on individual dialects, because of the wide geographical distribution and cultural diversity of its speakers.
Like all other varieties of Chinese, there is significant dispute as to whether Mandarin is a language or a dialect. See Identification of the varieties of Chinese for more on this issue.
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[edit] History
The present divisions of the Chinese language developed out of the different ways in which dialects of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese evolved.
Most Chinese living in northern and southwestern China are native speakers of a dialect of Mandarin. The prevalence of this linguistic homogeneity in northern China is largely the result of geography: much of northern China is covered by plains and is flat. In contrast to this, 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 northern China.
There is no clear line to mark where Middle Chinese ends and Mandarin begins; however, the Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn (中原音韵), a rhyme book from the Yuan Dynasty, is widely regarded as a 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.
Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people living in southern China spoke only their local language. Beijing Mandarin became dominant during the officially Manchu-speaking Qing Empire, and from the 17th century onward, the Empire set up Orthoepy Academies (Simplified Chinese: 正音书院; Traditional Chinese: 正音書院; pinyin: Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) in an attempt to make local pronunciations conform to the Beijing standard. These attempts, however, had little success.
This situation changed with the widespread introduction of Standard Mandarin as the national language, to be used in education, the media, and formal situations in both the PRC and the ROC (but not in Hong Kong). As a result, Standard Mandarin can now be spoken intelligibly as a second language by most younger people in Mainland China and Taiwan, with various regional accents. In Hong Kong and Macau, because of their colonial and linguistic history, the language of education, the media, formal speech and everyday life remains the local Cantonese, although Standard Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.
[edit] Name and classification
The English term comes from the Portuguese mandarim (from Malay menteri [2], both of which are from Sanskrit mantrin-, meaning minister); it is a translation of the Chinese term Guānhuà (Traditional Chinese: 官話; Simplified Chinese: 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 standard Mandarin. Another term commonly used to refer to all varieties of Mandarin is Běifānghuà (Simplified Chinese: 北方话; Traditional Chinese: 北方話), or the dialect(s) of the North.
[edit] Standard Mandarin
From an official point of view, there are two versions of Standard Mandarin, since the Beijing government refers to that on the Mainland as Putonghua, whereas the Taiwanese 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" Standard Mandarin are often quite different from the Mandarin dialects that are 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 (The Common Language)" 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.
[edit] Dialects
There are regional variations in Mandarin. This is manifested in two ways:
- The varieties of Mandarin cover a huge area containing nearly a billion people. As a result, there are pronounced regional variations in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. These regional differences are as pronounced as, or more so than, the differences in the varieties of English found in England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the United States.
- Standard Mandarin has been promoted very actively by the PRC, the ROC, and Singapore as a second language. As a result, those who are not native speakers of Standard Mandarin frequently flavor it with a strong infusion of the sounds of their native tongues.
Dialects of Mandarin can be subdivided into eight categories: Beijing Mandarin, Northeastern Mandarin, Ji Lu Mandarin, Jiao Liao Mandarin, Zhongyuan Mandarin, Lan Yin Mandarin, Southwestern Mandarin, and Jianghuai Mandarin. Jin is sometimes considered the ninth category of Mandarin. (Others separate it from Mandarin altogether.)
[edit] Phonology
- See standard Mandarin for a description of Standard Mandarin phonology and dialects of Mandarin for an overview of the phonologies of Mandarin dialects.
Mandarin, like most Chinese dialects/languages, is syllable timed, as opposed to many Western languages, including English, which are stress timed.
The set of possible syllables in Mandarin is very small, since each syllable has to be constructed after the pattern C(G)V(X), where G is a glide ([j], [ɥ], or [w]); and X is [n], [ŋ], or [ɻ]; plus tone. Not every syllable that is possible according to this rule actually exists in Mandarin, and in practice there are only a few hundred distinct syllables.
[edit] Vocabulary
There are more polysyllabic words in Mandarin than in all other varieties of Chinese except Shanghainese. This is partly because Mandarin has undergone many more sound changes than have southern varieties of Chinese, and has needed to deal with many more homophones — usually by forming new words via compounding, or by adding affixes such as lao- (老), -zi (子), -(e)r (儿), and -tou (头). There are also a small number of words that have been polysyllabic since Old Chinese, such as húdié (蝴蝶, butterfly).
The singular pronouns in Mandarin are wǒ (我) "I", nǐ (你) "you (informal)", nín (您) "you (formal)", and tā (他/她/它) "he/she/it", with -men (们) added for the plural. Further, there is a distinction between the plural first-person pronoun zánmen (咱们), which is inclusive of the listener, and wǒmen (我们), which is exclusive of the listener. Dialects of Mandarin agree with each other quite consistently on these pronouns, but not with other varieties of Chinese (e.g., Shanghainese has 侬 non "you" and 伊 yi "he/she").
Other morphemes that Mandarin dialects 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 咗 and 緊). Because of contact with Central Asian cultures, Mandarin has some loanwords from Altaic languages not present in other varieties of Chinese, such as hútong (胡同) "alley." Southern Chinese varieties have borrowed more from Tai or Austronesian languages.
[edit] Writing system
The writing system for almost all the varieties of Chinese is based on a set of written symbols that has been passed down with little change for more than two thousand years. Each of these varieties of Chinese has developed some new words during this time, words for which there are no matching characters in the original set. While it is of course possible to invent new characters (as was done to represent many elements in the periodic table), a more common course of development has been to borrow old characters that have fallen into disuse on the basis of their pronunciations.
In the original set of characters and definitions (containing more than 40,000 items) there were the demonstrative pronouns "this" (此, cǐ) and "that" (彼, bǐ). But these terms were rare in spoken Mandarin, where "zhè" and "nà" (or regional variants of them) were used instead. There are no components in the original set that have those meanings associated with those pronunciations, so a word pronounced "zhè" (這) was borrowed to write "this," and a word pronounced "nà" (那) was borrowed to write "that." Originally, 這 meant "to go forward to meet someone", and 那 was the name of a country (and later became a rare surname). But except for a few characters of this nature, the rest of the characters all follow their original meanings — so much so, in fact, that an educated reader of modern Mandarin will hardly find any trouble reading the ancient philosophical text Dao De Jing, which was written around 200 B.C. (Compare this to the fact that most English-speakers would find it nearly impossible to read Beowulf in the original Anglo-Saxon.)
As with other varieties of Chinese, the government of the People's Republic of China (as well as some other governments and institutions) has put a set of simplified forms into operation. Under this system, the forms of the words "here" (zhè lǐ) and "there" (nà lǐ) changed from 這裡 and 那裡 to 这里 and 那里. (See Simplified Chinese for more.)
[edit] Mandarin Literature
Originally, written Chinese was learned and composed as a special language. It may originally have rather closely represented the way people spoke, but with time the spoken and written languages diverged rather strongly. The written language, called "classical Chinese" or "literary Chinese," is much more concise than spoken Chinese, the main reason being that a single written character is often just what one wants to communicate yet its single syllable would not communicate an unambiguous meaning if spoken because of the huge number of homonyms. For instance, 翼 (yì, wing) is unambiguous in written Chinese but would be lost among its more than 75 homonyms in spoken Chinese.
For writing formal histories, for writing government documents, and even for writing poetry and fiction, the written language was adequate and economical of both printing resources and the human effort of writing things down. But to record materials meant to be reproduced in oral presentations, materials such as plays and grist for the professional story-teller's mill, the classical written language was not appropriate. Even written records of the words of a famous teacher like Zhu Xi (1130-1200) tend strongly to reflect his spoken language. From at least the Yuan dynasty plays that recounted the subversive tales of China's Robin Hoods to the Ming dynasty novels, such as Shui Hu Zhuan (Outlaws of the marsh), on down to the Qing dynasty novel Hong Lou Meng (usually translated as "Dream of the Red Chamber") and beyond, there developed a vernacular Chinese literature (bái hùa wén xúe). In many cases this written language reflected the Mandarin spoken language, and, since pronunciation differences were not conveyed in this written form, this tradition had a unifying force across all the Mandarin speaking regions and beyond.
A pivotal character during the first half of the twentieth century, Hu Shi, wrote an influential and perceptive study of this literary tradition, entitled Bái huà wén xué shǐ (A history of vernacular literature).
[edit] References
- Chao, Yuen Ren (1968). A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-00219-9.
- Norman, Jerry (1988). Chinese. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-29653-6.
- Ramsey, S. Robert (1987). The Languages of China. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01468-X.
- Novotná, Z., "Contributions to the Study of Loan-Words and Hybrid Words in Modern Chinese", Archiv Orientalni, (Prague), No.35 (1967), pp.613-648. (In English: examples of loan words and calques in Chinese)
- Novotná, Z., "Contributions to the Study of Loan-Words and Hybrid Words in Modern Chinese", Archiv Orientalni, (Prague), No.36 (1968), pp.295-325.(In English: examples of loan words and calques in Chinese)
- Novotná, Z., "Contributions to the Study of Loan-Words and Hybrid Words in Modern Chinese", Archiv Orientalni, (Prague), No.37 (1969), pp.48-75.(In English: examples of loan words and calques in Chinese)
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Ethnologue report on Mandarin
- Learn Chinese Free Mandarin lessons with audio.
- Chinese-English dictionary A customizable dictionary with over 30.000 entries. Audio is available.
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| Traditional categories: | ||||
| Other: | ||||
| Unclassified: | ||||
| Note: The above is only one classification scheme among many. The categories in italics are not universally acknowledged to be independent categories. |
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| Subcategories of Mandarin: | Northeastern | Beijing | Ji-Lu | Jiao-Liao | Zhongyuan | Lan-Yin | Southwestern | Jianghuai | Dungan | |||
| Subcategories of Min: | Min Bei | Min Nan | |||
| Min Dong | Min Zhong | Hainanese | Puxian | | Shaojiang | ||||
| Comprehensive list of Chinese dialects | ||||
| Official spoken varieties: | Standard Mandarin | Standard Cantonese | |||
| Historical phonology: | Old Chinese | Middle Chinese | Proto-Min | Proto-Mandarin | Haner | |||
| Chinese: written varieties | ||||
| Official written varieties: | Classical Chinese | Vernacular Chinese | |||
| Other varieties: | Written Vernacular Cantonese | |||
