Mandarin Chinese

Mandarin, also known as Northern Chinese, is the biggest branch of the Sinitic language family. About 70% of all Chinese speakers use a Mandarin variety as their native tongue, spread across a huge area that runs from Yunnan in the southwest up to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast. This wide distribution is usually explained by the easier travel across the North China Plain compared to the more mountainous south, along with northern dialects being carried more recently into frontier regions. With nearly a billion native speakers, Mandarin as a whole often tops lists of the world's most spoken languages.

The name "Mandarin" has an interesting history. It comes into English via Portuguese *mandarim*, which itself traces back through Malay *menteri* to the Sanskrit words *mantrī* and *mantrin*, meaning 'minister or counsellor'—originally referring to officials of the Ming and Qing empires. Because these officials often spoke mutually unintelligible local varieties, they used a common koiné language based on northern dialects. When 16th-century Jesuit missionaries learned this standard, they called it "Mandarin" after its Chinese name *Guānhuà* ('language of the officials'). In everyday English today, "Mandarin" usually means Standard Chinese, often just called "Chinese." This standard is based on the Beijing dialect but also borrows some words and sentence structures from other Mandarin varieties. It serves as the official spoken language of mainland China (where it's called *Pǔtōnghuà*, 'common speech') and Taiwan (called *Guóyǔ*, 'national language'), is one of four official languages in Singapore (called *Huáyǔ*), and is a high-prestige minority language in Malaysia. It's also one of the six official languages of the United Nations, listed as "Chinese." Linguists, however, use "Mandarin" more broadly for the whole group of northern and southwestern dialects that Chinese linguists call *Guānhuà*. The alternative term *Běifānghuà* ('Northern dialects') is used less often by Chinese scholars. For historical periods, "Old Mandarin" or "Early Mandarin" refers to northern dialects found in records from the Yuan dynasty.

Most Mandarin varieties have four lexical tones, plus unstressed syllables that are often described as having a neutral tone. The final stop consonants of Middle Chinese have disappeared in most of these dialects, though some have merged them into a final glottal stop. Many Mandarin varieties, including the Beijing dialect, keep retroflex initial consonants, which southern Chinese varieties have lost. Despite the name "Northern Chinese," not all Mandarin varieties are mutually intelligible with the Beijing dialect—those from the Southwest and the Lower Yangtze region, for example, are not. Native speakers who aren't linguists may not realize their local speech is classified as "Mandarin" in this broader sense. In Chinese social life, there's no unified "Mandarin" identity; instead, people have strong regional ties to their specific dialect, often referring to it by a geographic name like Sichuan dialect, Hebei dialect, or Northeastern dialect, all seen as distinct from the standard language.

The historical capitals of China have mostly been located within the Mandarin-speaking area for the last two thousand years, giving these dialects a lot of prestige. Some form of Mandarin has been used as a lingua franca for government officials and courts since at least the 14th century. In the early 20th century, a standard language based on the Beijing dialect, with elements from other Mandarin varieties, was adopted as the national language. More recently, increased migration from Mandarin-speaking parts of China and Taiwan has made it one of the more common varieties of Chinese among diaspora communities, and it's the most frequently taught form of Chinese as a foreign language.

The hundreds of modern Chinese dialects developed from regional forms of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese. Traditionally, seven major dialect groups were recognized: Mandarin plus Wu, Gan, Xiang, Min, Hakka, and Yue. The 1987 Language Atlas of China added three more groups: Jin (split from Mandarin), Huizhou, and Pinghua. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty (959–1126) and during the Jin and Yuan dynasties in the north, a common speech called Old Mandarin developed from the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. This language was used for new types of vernacular literature, including verse, drama, and story forms like *qu* and *sanqu* poetry. Its rhyming rules were recorded in the *Zhongyuan Yinyun* rime dictionary of 1324, a major break from the older rime table tradition.