Name	Mandarin
Nativename	官話/官话 ''Guānhuà''
Familycolor	Sino-Tibetan
Region	Most of northern and southwestern China(see also Standard Chinese)
Speakers	Native: 845 millionOverall: 1,365,053,177
Fam2	Sinitic
Fam3	Chinese
Dia1	Northeastern
Dia2	Beijing
Dia3	Ji-Lu
Dia4	Jiao-Liao
Dia5	Lower Yangtze
Dia6	Central Plains
Dia7	Lan-Yin
Dia8	Southwestern
Dia9	Jin (disputed)
Map	Mandarin and Jin in China.png
Mapcaption	Mandarin area, with disputed Jin group in light green
Imagecaption	Guānhuà (''Mandarin'') written in Chinese characters
Iso1	zh |iso2b chi |iso2t zho |iso3 cmn |lingua 79-AAA-b
Notice	IPA }}

In Chinese linguistics, Mandarin (|s=|p=Guānhuà|l=speech of officials}}) refers to a group of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. Because most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is also referred to as the "northern dialect(s)" (). There are pronounced regional variations in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar, on the order of regional variations of the English language in England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the United States. A northeastern-dialect speaker and a southwestern-dialect speaker can hardly communicate except through the standard language, mainly because of the differences in tone. Nonetheless, the variation within Mandarin does not compare with the much greater variation found within several other varieties of Chinese, and this is thought to be due to a relatively recent spread of Mandarin across China, combined with a greater ease of travel and communication compared to the more mountainous south of China.

When the Mandarin group is taken as one language, as is often done in academic literature, it has more native speakers (nearly a billion) than does any other language. For most of Chinese history, the capital has been within the Mandarin area, making these dialects very influential. Mandarin dialects, particularly the Beijing dialect, form the basis of Standard Chinese, which is also known as "Mandarin".

Name

The English word "mandarin" (from Portuguese ''mandarim,'' from Malay , from Hindi ''mantri,'' from Sanskrit ''mantrin,'' meaning "minister or counselor"), originally meant an official of the Chinese empire. As their home dialects were varied and often mutually unintelligible, these officials communicated using a koiné based on various northern dialects. When Jesuit missionaries learned this standard language in the 16th century, they called it Mandarin, from its Chinese name ''Guānhuà'' (官话/官話), or "language of the officials".

In everyday English, "Mandarin" refers to Standard Chinese, which is often called simply "Chinese". Standard Chinese is based on the particular Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing, with some lexical and syntactic influence from other Mandarin dialects. It is the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the official language of the Republic of China (R.O.C./Taiwan), and one of the four official languages of Singapore. It also functions as the language of instruction in the PRC and in Taiwan. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations, under the name "Chinese". Chinese speakers refer to the modern standard language as ''Pǔtōnghuà'' (on the mainland), ''Guóyǔ'' (in Taiwan) or ''Huáyǔ'' (in Singapore), but not as ''Guānhuà''.

This article uses the term "Mandarin" in the sense used by linguists, referring to the diverse group of Mandarin dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China, which Chinese linguists call ''Guānhuà''. The alternative term ''Běifānghuà'' (), or "Northern dialect(s)", is used less and less among Chinese linguists. By extension, the term "Old Mandarin" is used by linguists to refer to the northern dialects recorded in materials from the Yuan dynasty.

Native speakers who are not academic linguists may not recognize that the variants they speak are classified in linguistics as members of "Mandarin" (or so-called "Northern dialects") in a broader sense. Within Chinese social or cultural discourse, there is not a common "Mandarin" identity based on language; rather, there are strong regional identities centred on individual dialects because of the wide geographical distribution and cultural diversity of their speakers. Speakers of forms of Mandarin other than the standard typically refer to the variety they speak by a geographic name—for example Sichuan dialect, Hebei dialect or Northeastern dialect, all being regarded as distinct from the "Standard Chinese" (''Putonghua'').

As with all other varieties of the Chinese language, there is significant dispute as to whether Mandarin is a language or a dialect. See Varieties of Chinese for more on this issue.

History

The present Chinese language varieties developed out of the different ways in which dialects of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese evolved. Traditionally, seven major groups of dialects have been recognized. Aside from Mandarin, the other six are Wu Chinese, Hakka Chinese, Min Chinese, Xiang Chinese, Yue Chinese and Gan Chinese. More recently, other more specific groups have been recognized.

Old Mandarin

After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty, northern China was under the control of the Jin (Jurchen) and Yuan (Mongol) dynasties. During this period, a new common speech developed, based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital, a language referred to as Old Mandarin. New genres of vernacular literature were based on this language, including verse, drama and story forms.

The rhyming conventions of the new verse were codified in a rhyme dictionary called the ''Zhongyuan Yinyun'' (1324). A radical departure from the rhyme table tradition that had evolved over the previous centuries, this dictionary contains a wealth of information on the phonology of Old Mandarin. Further sources are the 'Phags-pa script 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 rhyme dictionary based on 'Phags-pa. The rhyme books differ in some details, but overall show many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects, such as the reduction and disappearance of final stop consonants and the reorganization of the Middle Chinese tones.

The ''Zhongyuan Yinyun'' shows the typical Mandarin four-tone system resulting from a split of the "even" tone and loss of the entering tone, with its syllables distributed across the other tones (though their different origin is marked in the dictionary). Similarly, voiced stops and affricates have become voiceless aspirates in the "even" tone and voiceless non-aspirates in others, another distinctive Mandarin development. However, the language still retained a final ''-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).

Vernacular literature

Until the early 20th century, formal writing and even much poetry and fiction was done in Literary Chinese, which was modelled on the classics of the Warring States period and 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 instance, 翼 (''yì,'' wing) is unambiguous in written Chinese, but would be lost among its more than 75 homophones in spoken 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 professional 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 written language reflected Mandarin varieties, 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.

Hu Shih, a pivotal figure of the first half of the twentieth century, wrote an influential and perceptive study of this literary tradition, entitled ''Báihuà Wénxuéshǐ'' (A History of Vernacular Literature).

Koiné of the Late Empire

Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people living in southern China spoke only their local language. 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''. Knowledge 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 provide for the teaching of proper pronunciation. Although the resulting Academies for Correct Pronunciation (正音書院, ''Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn'') were short-lived, the decree did spawn a number of textbooks that give some insight into the ideal pronunciation. Common features included:

loss of the Middle Chinese voiced initials except for ''v-''

merger of ''-m'' finals with ''-n''

the characteristic Mandarin four-tone system in open syllables, but retaining a final glottal stop in "entering tone" syllables

retention of the distinction between palatalized velars and dental affricates, the source of the spellings "Peking" and "Tientsin" for modern "Beijing" and "Tianjin".

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 essential for any business with the imperial court.

Standard Chinese

In the early years of the Republic of China, intellectuals of the New Culture Movement, such as Hu Shih and Chen Duxiu, successfully campaigned for the replacement of Literary Chinese as the written standard by written vernacular Chinese, which was based on northern dialects. A parallel priority was the definition of a standard national language (; ; , pinyin: Guó​yǔ). After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation, the National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard, calling it ''pǔtōnghuà'' (; ; literally "common speech").

The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both the PRC and the R.O.C. (but not in Hong Kong and Macau). This standard can now be spoken intelligibly 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 the standard language is now very influential. In Mandarin-speaking areas such as Sichuan, the local dialect is the mother tongue of most of the population. The era of mass education in Standard Chinese has not erased these regional differences, and people may be either diglossic or speak the standard language with a notable accent.

From an official point of view, the PRC government and R.O.C. government maintain their own forms of the standard under different names. Technically, both ''Pǔtōng​huà​'' and ''Guó​yǔ'' base their phonology on the Beijing accent, though ''Pǔtōng​huà''​ 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" Chinese are often quite different from the Mandarin dialects that are spoken in accordance with regional habits, and neither is wholly identical to the Beijing dialect. ''Pǔtōng​huà​'' and ''Guó​yǔ'' 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 while people in Taiwan, Macao and Hong Kong generally use traditional characters.

Geographic distribution and dialects

Most Han Chinese living in northern and south-western China are native speakers of a dialect of Mandarin. The North China Plain provided few barriers to migration, leading to relative linguistic homogeneity over a wide area in northern China. In contrast, the mountains and rivers of southern China have spawned the other six major groups of Chinese dialects, with great internal diversity, particularly in Fujian.

However, 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.

Most of northeastern China, except for Liaoning, did not receive significant settlements by Han Chinese until the 18th century, and as a result the Northeastern Mandarin dialects spoken there differ little from Beijing Mandarin. The Manchu people of the area now speak these dialects exclusively. The frontier areas of Northwest and Southwest China were colonized by speakers of Mandarin dialects at the same time, and the dialects in those areas similarly closely resemble their relatives in the core Mandarin area. However, long-established cities even very close to Beijing, such as Tianjin, Baoding, Shenyang, and Dalian, have markedly different dialects.

Unlike their compatriots on the south-east coast, few speakers of Mandarin dialects emigrated from China until the late 20th century, but there are now significant communities of them in cities across the world.

Classification

The classification of Chinese dialects evolved during the 20th century, and many points remain unsettled. Early classifications tended to follow provincial boundaries or major geographical features. In 1936, Wang Li produced the first classification based on phonetic criteria, principally the evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials. His ''Guānhuà'' group included dialects of northern and southwestern China, as well as Hunan and northern Jiangxi. Li Fang-Kuei's classification of 1937 distinguished the latter two groups as Xiang and Gan, while splitting the ''Guānhuà'' group into Northern, Lower Yangtze and Southwestern ''Guānhuà'' groups. The widely accepted seven-group classification of Yuan Jiahua in 1960 retained separate Xiang and Gan groups, beside a single Mandarin group with Northern, Northwestern, Southwestern and Jianghuai (Lower Yangtze) subgroups.

The linguist Li Rong proposed that the Jin dialects of Shanxi and neighbouring areas constitute a separate group at the same level as Mandarin, and used this classification in the ''Language Atlas of China'' (1987). Li distinguishes these dialects based on their retention of the Middle Chinese entering tone (stop-final) category (also preserved by Jiang-Huai dialects) and other features. Many other linguists continue to treat these dialects as a subgroup of Mandarin.

The ''Language Atlas of China'' divides the remaining Mandarin dialects into eight subgroups, distinguished by their treatment of the Middle Chinese entering tone (see Tones below):

Northeastern, or that spoken in the northeast of China (known in the West as Manchuria), except the Liaodong Peninsula: This dialect is closely related to Standard Chinese, with little variation in lexicon; there are very few tonal changes.

Beijing and environs, such as Chengde, Hebei: The basis of Standard Chinese. Some people in areas of recent large-scale immigration, such as northern Xinjiang, speak the Beijing dialect or something very close to it.

Ji-Lu, or that spoken in Hebei ("Ji") and Shandong ("Lu") provinces, except the Jiaodong Peninsula, including Tianjin dialect: Tones are markedly different, but vocabulary is generally similar; generally, full intelligibility is not difficult with Beijing Mandarin.

Jiao-Liao, or that spoken in Shandong (Jiaodong) Peninsula and Liaodong Peninsula: Very noticable tonal changes, different in "flavour" from Ji-Lu Mandarin, but with more variance; significant, but not full intelligibility with Beijing.

Zhongyuan (lit. "central plain"), spoken in Henan province, the central parts of Shaanxi in the Yellow River valley, and southern Xinjiang: Significant phonological differences, with partial intelligibility with Beijing. The Dungan language, a Chinese-derived language spoken in Kyrgyzstan, belongs to this group and is generally intelligible with Mandarin.

Lan-Yin, or that spoken in Gansu province (with capital Lanzhou) and Ningxia autonomous region (with capital Yinchuan), as well as northern Xinjiang.

Jiang-huai (or Xia-Jiang), spoken in the parts of Jiangsu and Anhui on the north bank of the Yangtze, as well as some areas on the south bank, such as Nanjing in Jiangsu, Jiujiang in Jiangxi, etc.: Significant phonological and lexical changes to varied degrees; intelligibility is limited. Jiang-Huai has been significantly influenced by Wu Chinese.

Southwestern, or that spoken in the provinces of Hubei, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, and the Mandarin-speaking areas of Guangxi: Sharp phonological, lexical, and tonal changes are present; intelligibility with Beijing is limited to varied degrees.

Phonology

Syllables consist maximally of an initial consonant, a glide, a vowel, a final, and tone. Not every syllable that is possible according to this rule actually exists in Mandarin, as there are rules prohibiting certain phonemes from appearing with others, and in practice there are only a few hundred distinct syllables.

Phonological features that are generally shared by the Mandarin dialects include:

the palatalization of velars and alveolar sibilants when they occur before palatal glides;

the disappearance of final stops and /-m/ (although in many Jianghuai Mandarin and Jin dialects, an echo of the final stops is preserved as a glottal stop);

the reduction of the six tones inherited from Middle Chinese after the tone split to four tones;

the presence of retroflex consonants (although these are absent in many dialects of Southwestern and Northeastern Mandarin);

the historical devoicing of plosives and sibilants (also common to most non-Mandarin varieties).

Initials

A generalized table for the initials of the Mandarin dialects is as follows. Initials not present in the standard language are placed within parentheses.

{|class="wikitable" style="text-align: center" |- ! ! colspan="2" | Bilabial ! colspan="2" | Labio-dental ! colspan="2" | Alveolar ! colspan="2" | Retroflex ! colspan="2" | Alveolo-palatal ! colspan="2" | Velar ! colspan="2" | Glottal |- ! Plosives | | | colspan="2" | | | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | | | colspan="2" | () |- ! Nasals | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | () | colspan="2" | |- ! Fricatives | colspan="2" | | | () | colspan="2" | | | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | |- ! Affricates | colspan="2" | | () | () | | | | | | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | |- ! Approximant | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | | colspan="2" | |}

The retroflex initials are missing in many dialects of Manchuria and southern China, where they are replaced by the alveolar sibilants . (''zhi'' becomes ''zi'', ''chi'' becomes ''ci'', ''shi'' becomes ''si'', and ''ri'' or may sound like .) This is also common in the Mandarin spoken in Taiwan. Most other Mandarin-speaking areas do distinguish between the retroflex and alveolar sibilants, but they are often in different distribution than in standard Mandarin.

The alveolo-palatal sibilants are the result of merger between the historical palatalized velars and palatalized alveolar sibilants . In about 20% of dialects, the alveolar sibilants failed to palatalize, remaining separate from the alveolo-palatal initials. (The unique pronunciation used in Beijing opera falls into this category.) On the other side, in some dialects of eastern Shandong, the velar initials have failed to palatalize.

Many southwestern Mandarin dialects mix ''f-'' and ''hu-'' , substituting one for the other in some or all cases. For example, ''fei'' "to fly" and ''hui'' "dust" may be merged in these areas.

In some dialects, initial and are not distinguished. In Southwestern Mandarin, these sounds usually merge to ; in Jianghuai Mandarin, they usually merge to .

People in many Mandarin-speaking areas may use different initial sounds where Beijing uses initial ''r-'' . Common variants include ''y-'', ''l-'', ''n-'', and ''w-'' .

, and , used as initials in earlier forms of Chinese, have merged with the zero initial in most dialects of Mandarin.

Many dialects of Northwestern and Central Plains Mandarin have where Beijing has . Thus, "pig" for Standard , "water" for Standard , "soft" for Standard , and so forth.

Finals

In many widely scattered Mandarin dialects, finals ''ai ei ao ou'' are pronounced as monophthongs (i.e. with no glide).

Beijing Mandarin and Northeastern Mandarin underwent more vowel mergers than many other varieties of Mandarin. For example:

!rowspan=2 lesson guest fruit country

Meaning !!colspan=2	Standard(Beijing) !!rowspan=2| Jinan(Ji Lu)!!rowspan=2| Xi'an(Zhongyuan)!!rowspan=2| Chengdu(Southwestern)!!rowspan=2| Yangzhou(Jianghuai)
!Pinyin!!IPA
課	|	''kè''
客	|
果	|	''guǒ''
國	|	''guó''

:Standard finals such as ''e'', ''o'', ''ai'', ''ei'', ''ao'', ''u'', ''üe'', and ''ie'' often turn up unpredictably as other vowels in other dialects. The rules are complex and are the result of Middle Chinese phonology (especially interactions with final stop consonants) undergoing divergent development in different Mandarin dialects.

The medial ''-u-'' , occurring with an alveolar consonant, is often lost in southwestern Mandarin. Hence we get ''dei'' "right" where standard Mandarin has ''dui'' , ''ten'' "swallow" where the standard has ''tun'' .

Southwestern Mandarin have ''gai kai hai'' in a few (not all) words where the standard has ''jie qie xie'' . This is a stereotypical feature of southwestern Mandarin, since it is so easily noticeable. E.g. ''hai'' "shoe" for standard ''xie'', ''gai'' "street" for standard ''jie''.

In some areas (especially southwestern) final ''-ng'' changes into ''-n'' . This is especially prevalent in the rhyme pairs ''-en/-eng'' and ''-in/-ing'' . As a result, ''jīn'' "gold" and ''jīng'' "capital" merge in those dialects.

Some dialects of Mandarin have a final glottal stop in certain words. See the second point under "Tones", below.

R-coloring, a characteristic feature of Mandarin, works quite differently in the southwest. Whereas Beijing dialect generally removes only a final or when adding the rhotic final ''-r'' , in the southwest the ''-r'' replaces the nearly the entire rhyme.

Tones

In general, no two Mandarin-speaking areas have exactly the same set of tone values. On the other hand, most Mandarin-speaking areas have very similar tone ''distribution'' – for example, the dialects of Jinan, Chengdu, Xi'an etc. all have four tones that correspond quite well to the Beijing tones of (55), (35), (214), and (51). The exception to this rule lies in the distribution of syllables formerly ending in a stop consonant, which are treated differently in different dialects of Mandarin.

In most Mandarin dialects, syllables that ended in a stop consonant in Middle Chinese (i.e. /p/, /t/ or /k/), which formerly had no tone to speak of, have lost that consonant entirely and have been assigned one of the four tones. The way that tones were assigned differs from dialect to dialect and depends on the initial consonant. Note in particular that, in the Beijing dialect that underlies Standard Mandarin, syllables beginning with originally unvoiced consonants were redistributed across the four tones in a completely random pattern. For example, the three characters 积脊迹, all pronounced in Middle Chinese (William H. Baxter's reconstruction), are now pronounced ''jī jǐ jì'', with tones 1 3 4 respectively. Older dictionaries such as ''Mathews' Chinese–English Dictionary'' mark characters whose pronunciation formerly ended with a stop with a superscript 5; however, this tone number is more commonly used for syllables that always have a neutral tone (see below).

In Jianghuai dialects, a minority of Southwestern dialects (e.g. Minjiang) and Jin (sometimes considered non-Mandarin), former final stops were not deleted entirely, but were reduced to a glottal stop . This is in common with the non-Mandarin Wu dialects, and is thought to represent the pronunciation of Old Mandarin.

Note that traditional Chinese phonology considers syllables ending in a stop consonant (including a glottal stop) as containing a special tone known as the ''entering tone'', and as a result dialects such as Jianghuai and Minjiang are said to have five tones instead of four. However, modern linguistics considers these syllables as having no phonemic tone at all.

Standard Mandarin and many northern dialects frequently employ neutral tones in the second syllables of words, creating syllables whose tone contour is so short and light that it is difficult or impossible to discriminate. However in many areas, especially in the south, the tones of all syllables are made clear. This is also characteristic of non-Mandarin dialects.

Tone distribution variation:

V- = obstruent unvoiced initial consonant L = sonorant voiced initial consonant V+ = obstruent voiced initial consonant

+ Reflexes of Middle Chinese tones in Mandarin dialects

colspan=2

V-

L

V+

V-

L

V+

V-

L

V+

V-

L

V+

Beijing

redistributed with no pattern

Northeastern

mostly 3; otherwise, redistributed with no pattern

Ji-Lu

1

Jiao-Liao

3

Zhongyuan

Lan-Yin

Southwestern (most places)

Jianghuai

Tone contour variation:

+ Phonetic realization of Mandarin tones in principal dialects
	1 (Yin Ping)	2 (Yang Ping)	3 (Shang)	4 (Qu)	marked withglottal stop (Ru)
Beijing	Beijing	(55)	(35)	(214)	(51)
Northeastern	Harbin	(44)	(24)	(213)	(52)
	Tianjin	(21)	(35)	(113)	(53)
Shijiazhuang	(23)	(53)	(55)	(31)
Jiao-Liao	Yantai	(31)	( (55))	(214)	(55)
	Zhengzhou	(24)	(42)	(53)	(312)
Luoyang	(34)	(42)	(54)	(31)
Xi'an	(21)	(24)	(53)	(44)
Tianshui		(53)	(24)
	Lanzhou	(31)	(53)	(33)	(24)
Yinchuan	(44)		(13)
	Chengdu	(44)	(21)	(53)	(213)
Xichang	(33)	(52)	(45)	(213)	(31)
Kunming	(44)	(31)	(53)	(212)
Wuhan	(55)	(213)	(42)	(35)
Liuzhou	(44)	(31)	(53)	(24)
	Yangzhou	(31)	(35)	(42)	(55)	(5)
Nantong	(21)	(35)	(55)	(42), (213)*	(4), (5)*

* Dialects in and around the Nantong area typically have many more than 4 tones, due to influence from the neighbouring Wu dialects.

Grammar

Chinese varieties of all periods have traditionally been considered prime examples of analytic languages, relying on word order and particles instead of inflection or affixes to provide grammatical information such as person, number, tense, mood, or case. Although modern varieties, including the Mandarin dialects, use a small number of particles in a similar fashion to suffixes, they are still strongly analytic.

The basic word order of subject–verb–object is common across Chinese dialects, but there are variations in the order of the two objects of ditransitive sentences. In northern dialects the indirect object precedes the direct object (as in English), for example in the Standard Chinese sentence

{| style="border: 1px solid darkgray; text-align: center;" | 我 || 给 || 你 || 一本 || 书 。 |- | ''wǒ'' || ''gěi'' || ''nǐ'' || ''yìběn'' || ''shū''. |- | I || give || you || a || book. |}

In southern dialects, as well as many southwestern and Jiang-Huai dialects, the objects occur in the reverse order.

Most varieties of Chinese use post-verbal particles to indicate aspect, but the particles used vary. Most Mandarin dialects use the particle ''-le'' (了) to indicate the perfective aspect and ''-zhe'' (著/着) for the progressive aspect. Other Chinese varieties tend to use different particles, e.g. Cantonese ''jo²'' 咗 and ''gan²'' 緊/紧 respectively. The experiential aspect particle ''-guo'' (過/过) is used more widely, except in Southern Min.

The subordinative particle ''de'' (的) is characteristic of Mandarin dialects. Some southern dialects, and a few Jiang-Huai dialects, preserve an older pattern of subordination without a marking particle, while in others a classifier fulfils the role of the Mandarin particle.

Especially in conversational Chinese, sentence-final particles alter the inherent meaning of a sentence. Like much vocabulary, particles can vary a great deal with regards to the locale. For example, the particle ''ma'' (嘛), which is used in most northern dialects to denote obviousness or contention, is replaced by ''yo'' (哟) in southern usage.

Vocabulary

There are more polysyllabic words in Mandarin than in all other major 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. New words have been formed by adding affixes such as ''lao-'' (老), ''-zi'' (子), ''-(e)r'' (兒/儿), and ''-tou'' (頭/头), or by compounding, e.g. by combining two words of similar meaning as in ''cōngmáng'' (匆忙), made from elements meaning "hurried" and "busy". A distinctive feature of southwestern Mandarin is its frequent use of noun reduplication, which is hardly used in Beijing. In Sichuan, one hears ''baobao'' "handbag" where Beijing uses ''bao'r''. 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/妳) "you", ''nín'' (您) "you (formal)", and ''tā'' (他/她/它) "he/she/it", with ''-men'' (們/们) added for the plural. Further, there is a distinction between the plural first-person pronoun ''zánmen'' (咱們/咱们), which is inclusive of the listener, and ''wǒmen'' (我們/我们), which may be exclusive of the listener. Dialects of Mandarin agree with each other quite consistently on these pronouns. While the first and second person singular pronouns are cognate with forms in other varieties of Chinese, the rest of the pronominal system is a Mandarin innovation (e.g., Shanghainese has 侬/儂 ''non'' "you" and 伊 ''yi'' "he/she").

Because of contact with Mongolian and Manchurian peoples, Mandarin (especially the Northeastern varieties) has some loanwords from these languages not present in other varieties of Chinese, such as ''hútòng'' (胡同) "alley". Southern Chinese varieties have borrowed from Tai, Austro-Asiatic, and Austronesian languages.

In general, the greatest variation occurs in slang, in kinship terms, in names for common crops and domesticated beasts, for common verbs and adjectives, and other such everyday terms. The least variation occurs in "formal" vocabulary—terms dealing with science, law, or government.

See also

Chinese dictionary

References

;Footnotes

;Works cited

Further reading

Novotná, Z., "Contributions to the Study of Loan-Words and Hybrid Words in Modern Chinese", ''Archiv Orientalni'', (Prague), No.35 (1967), (In English: examples of loan words and calques in Chinese)

External links

Tones in Mandarin Dialects : Comprehensive tone comparison charts for 523 Mandarin dialects. (Compiled by James Campbell) – Internet Archive mirror

Category:Chinese dialects Category:Chinese languages in Singapore Category:Languages of China Category:Languages of Hong Kong Category:Languages of Macau Category:Languages of Russia Category:Languages of Taiwan Category:SVO languages

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