Standard Mandarin

Standard Mandarin is a standardized version of the Mandarin language and serves as the official language of the Republic of China. The official guide on the language, Standard Mandarin Guide is published by the country's Ministry of Education and is the authoritative document on the language used for official testing and compulsory education.

History

The Mandarin has its roots during the last quarter of the Ts'ing dynasty when its rule was endangered by presistent weakness in foreign affairs. Lack of unity in general was cited as a contributory issue, and based on western experience in creating a nation-state, a common spoken language was argued at court as a means to facilitate communication, commerce, and ultimately political loyalty. Despite such early beginnings, the Mandarin project did not make much progress at the time.

As the Ts'ing dynasty fell, the Mandarin project was again mentioned as a measure to shore up support for the new Republic through the invention of a nation-state with a common language. However, because Chinese was (and very much still is) a group of phylogenetically related and mutually unintelligible tongues, it was highly controversial which of the dialects would be selected as standard. Most major dialects were not monolithic dialects in and of themselves but a more closely related group of sub-dialects.

The situation is further complicated by the presence of so-called "chanting tones", which were prestige-dialects or academic dialects that are loosely based on a local dialect but retains many archaic distinctions through rote memorization and "chanting" of canonical texts. These actively managed dialects often include idiosyncracies based on particular interpretations of canonical texts and their grammars as well as artifically-restored phonological elements found in ancient rime dictionaries.

Principles for standardization

In 1913, the Mandarin Commission set up by the Provisional Government in Peking voted first to exclude all "mean" (i.e. natural dialects) dialects from consideration, because the selection of any of them would constitute favourtism to that dialect's native speakers. Politically, such would also be unlikely to receive a majority sanction. The focus on chanting tones also meant that dialects may be objectively compared with each other to discover which one was the most conservative compared to a given standard.

Between 1913 and 1914, the commissioners studied the phonological structure of six major chanting schools' tones, from Peking, Nanking, Canton, Anhuei, Kiang-si, and Loh-yang, to construct a new dialect that respects the distinctions made in any one of these six major schools. Where the distinctions made were inconsistent, they were retrospectively made consistent with reference to rime dictionaries dating to the Sung dynasty (c. 960 CE).

The commissioners proceeded from word to word to determine what their correct phonological pronunciations ought to be in the new Standard Mandarin. The principles they followed were:

• If a dialect distinguishes a word from another, and all others have merged the word, then the phonological distinctiveness in that dialect would be deemed standard.
• If all dialects have merged a word with another, then the pronunciation that most closely approximates Late Middle Chinese would be deemed standard.
  • If it is not possible to determine which of several merged pronunciations most closely approximates Late Middle Chinese, the one with most segments would be deemed standard.

Thus, for example, the words 彈 談 潭 are all homophonous as /tan/ in Peking tone, but they remain distinct in Canton tone as /tan tam tom/. Standard Mandarin thus embraces the latter arrangement as standard.

Further, if the different phonemes in a word undergo different evolution in several chanting tones, the phoneme most conservative would be deemed standard. For example, the word 皆 "altogether" has the following readings:

• Peking tone: /t͡ʃjaj/
• Canton tone: /kaj/
• Standard Mandarin: /kjaj/

In this case, the Canton tone is more conservative in terms of the onset k-, which remains unpalatalized unlike the Peking tone where Middle Chinese kj- > t͡ʃj-. In the nucleus however the Peking tone has -jaj, which has the glide -j- as a reflex of Middle Chinese -r- (in Peking tone MC -r- and -j- have merged as -j-), while Canton has dropped the glide completely. While it conceivably may be argued Canton simply merged -r- and -0- glides compared to Peking merging -r- and -j-, and thus Canton is not necessarily more innovative, the Commission usually took the view that visible segments were more conservative. Thus, in Standard Mandarin, the composite reading of /kjaj/ is used for this word, as it combines the most conservative elements of both chanting tone.

On the subject of the stop codas of Middle Chinese, the Commission broke their own rules and permitted their deletion and replacement with glottal stop. This was because it became obvious that pronunciation of stop codas was deemed unduly hard for some speakers.

Phonology

Initials

Initials of Standard Mandarin

	Lenis	Asper	Nasal	Fricative	Approximant
Bilabial	p	pʰ	m	f　v	w
Coroneal	t	tʰ	n		l
Affricate	ts	tsʰ		s
Retroflex	ʈʂ	ʈʂʰ		ʂ	r
Palatal	tɕ	tɕʰ		ɕ	y
Velar	k	kʰ	ŋ	x	(w)
Glottal	ʔ