History of Standard Chinese

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Standard Chinese is a standard form of Mandarin Chinese with de facto official status in China, Taiwan, and Singapore.

The Chinese language has always consisted of a wide variety of dialects; hence prestige dialects and linguae francae have always been needed. Confucius (c. 551 – c. 479 BC) referred to yayan 'elegant speech' modeled on the dialect of the Zhou dynasty royal lands rather than regional dialects; texts authored during the Han dynasty (202 BC – 220 AD) also refer to tongyu (通語 'common language'). Rime dictionaries written since the Southern and Northern dynasties (420–589) likely also reflected systems of standard pronunciation. However, these standard dialects were largely unknown outside of the educated elite; even among the elite, pronunciations may have differed widely; this was enabled by the unifying factor of Literary Chinese as a written standard regardless of the dialect spoken.

The language of the literate ruling class was known as yayan (Zhou), tongyu (Han dynasty), and guanyun (Sui, Tang and Song dynasties), and mastery of these linguistic standards were necessary for upward advancement.^[1] Yuan dynasty North China developed a lingua franca known as han'er yuyan. Yuan era scholar Zhou Deqing published a book detailing a standard spoken Chinese, named Zhongyuan Yayin (Elegant pronunciation of the Central Plains), meant to represent the common spoken language rather than the "correct" literary pronunciation reflected in the Song dictionaries. This book became the standard speech of northern Chinese theatre forms.^[2] During the flight of the Song literati to the South after the Jurchen conquest, Neo-Confucians began to fixate on the idea of restoring "correct" pronunciation as it was believed to be spoken by the ancients. As a result, the subsequent rime dictionaries such as the Ming dynasty's Hongwu Zhengyun 洪武正韵 reflect the "ideal" pronunciations and deviated from the actual spoken pronunciations. This deviation differed from the Yuan dynasty's Zhongyuan Yayin which more closely reflected contemporary speech.^[3] Ming scholar Lu Kun criticised the Hongwu Zhengyun as too distant from the "elegant pronunciation of middle China" and was not actually spoken by court officials.^[2]

The Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1644–1912) began to use the term Guanhua (官話) 'official speech' to refer to the dialect used at the courts. 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.

Historically, the word "Mandarin" refers to the language spoken by the upper classes of 19th-century Beijing, as well as by the higher civil servants and military officers of the imperial regime serving throughout the country. This lect is quite close to modern Mandarin, but there exist some differences. The Mandarin language used many honorifics which have mostly disappeared in modern-day Mandarin daily speech, such as jian (賤 '[my] humble') and guì (貴 '[your] honorable').The grammar of the earlier form of Mandarin grammar was almost identical to that in contemporary Mandarin, with infrequent, minor differences in the usage of grammatical particular or word order in the sentence. Its vocabulary was also largely the same as in modern Mandarin, though some vocabulary has since been dropped from the language.

The existence of Guanhua was already known to Europeans by the time of Matteo Ricci, who worked in China from 1582 to 1610. Ricci wrote of "a spoken language common to the whole Empire, known as the Quonhua, an official language for civil and forensic use".^[4]

In the 17th century, the Qing 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. As late as the early 20th century, the position of Nanjing Mandarin was considered higher than that of Beijing by some and the postal romanization standard set in 1906 included spellings with elements of Nanjing pronunciation.^[5] The sense of Guoyu as a specific language variety promoted for general use by the citizenry was originally borrowed from Japan; in 1902 the Japanese Diet had formed the National Language Research Council to standardize a form of the Japanese language dubbed kokugo (国語).^[6] Reformers in the Qing bureaucracy took inspiration and borrowed the term into Chinese, and in 1909 the Qing education ministry officially proclaimed imperial Mandarin as Guoyu (国语; 國語), 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, who were chosen based as often on political considerations as often as on linguistic expertise. The conference deadlocked between promoters of northern and southern pronunciation standards and as a result, a compromise was produced. The Dictionary of National Pronunciation (國音詞典) was published, which attempted compromise between Beijingese and other regional dialects: it preserved the checked tone that had disappeared in Mandarin, as well as some consonantal endings from southern varieties and consonantal onsets from Wu. Ultimately, this attempt at synthesis was abandoned in favor of a pronunciation based on the Beijing dialect.^[7]

Meanwhile, vernacular literature continued to develop apace, despite the lack of a standardized pronunciation. Gradually, the members of the National Language Commission came to settle upon the Beijing dialect which became the major source of standard national pronunciation, due to the status of that dialect as a prestigious dialect. In 1932, the commission published the Vocabulary of National Pronunciation for Everyday Use (國音常用字彙), with little fanfare or official pronunciation. This dictionary was similar to the previous published one, now known as the Old National Pronunciation, except that it normalized the pronunciations for all characters into the pronunciation of the Beijing dialect. Despite efforts by some factions to recognize and promote southern Chinese varieties as well, the Kuomintang strongly promoted Guoyu as the one national language and censored and arrested opponents of this movement, continuing this through the wartime years. Elements from other dialects continue to exist in the standard language, but as exceptions rather than the rule.^[8]

The government of the People's Republic of China, established in 1949, continued the effort. In 1955, Guoyu was renamed Putonghua (普通話 'common speech'. The Republic of China on Taiwan continues to refer to Standard Chinese as Guoyu. Since then, the standards used in mainland China and Taiwan have diverged somewhat, though they continue to remain essentially identical.

After the handovers of Hong Kong and Macau, the term Putonghua is used in the special administrative regions of China and pinyin is widely used for teaching of Putonghua.

In both mainland China and Taiwan, the use of Mandarin as the medium of instruction in the educational system and in the media has contributed to the spread of Mandarin. As a result, Standard Chinese is now spoken fluently by most people in mainland China and in Taiwan. However, in Hong Kong and Macau, due to historical and linguistic reasons, the language of education and both formal and informal speech remains Cantonese despite the growing use of Standard Chinese.