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

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

As the Ts'yeng 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, if any, 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 of varying degrees of mutual intelligibility.

The situation is further complicated by the presence of so-called "chanting tones", which were prestige or academic dialects 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, their underlying grammars, and artifically-restored phonological elements found in ancient rime dictionaries.

Ultimately, the Mandarin Commission was set up under the Republic to consist of representatives from each province. Early discussions, which mostly centered on the selection of an extant dialect as the standard, proved universally objectionable to all deputations except the dialect's sponsor. Another plan, which is to select the pronunciation word-by-word from dialects by vote, is also considered less than ideal, as such a process disrespects the phonology of a dialect. Then, in 1914, the Commission endorsed the January Compromise, stating it would be unfair to select any existing dialect as standard and any eventual conclusion would have to be a hybrid dialect with a coherent phonology.

With the controversial notion of selecting an existing dialect explicitly abandoned, the Commission had much greater latitude in creating a dialect that could achieve at least acquiescence amongst the provincial deputations. The subject of ease-of-acquisition, which would be salient today to any designer of a constructed language, is not greatly expanded upon; the deputations were instead wont to insert their dialectal phonologies as much as possible through the argument that such features original to an older state of the Sinitic languages and were absent from other dialects. The Commisison on these lines drafted a phonology and dictionary for the standard and published them by May 1914. The resulting Standard was not categorically similar to any extant dialect and would have to be secondarily acquired by students.

After the first edition of the Standard Mandarin Guide (標準國語手冊) was published in 1914, its use in schools was promoted centrally with varying levels of success across the nation. It seems in primary schools it was largely ignored, while in secondary schools and universities its adoption was more widespread. Given secondary education was not widespread in China until the 1970s, Standard Mandarin remained a relevance only to individuals who sought highly publicized roles or employment out-of-province until then. However, since then a renewed effort has been experienced, and Standard Mandarin is now a mandatory subject in compulsory education.

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 phonemes in a word undergo separate 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.

Additionally, the Commission also restored some phonological features of Middle Chinese that are not conserved in any of the chanting tones consulted. For example, 清 MC tsjing and 青 MC tsing are not distinguished in any tone, but the Commission decided that since the analogous distinction is made in some tones for codas in -n, it would be more symmetrical to restore the same for the -ng coda. Additionally, the Commission thought that the conflation of these two words were a semantically-motivated anomaly.

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	ɳ	ʂ	r
Palatal	tɕ	tɕʰ	ɲ	ɕ	y
Velar	k	kʰ	ŋ	x	(w)
Glottal	ʔ

Praise and criticism

The Standard Mandarin project has been the subject of much controversy, down to today, throughout its entire conceptualization, even prior to its introduction.

The approach of the Mandarin Commission has been billed as somewhat mis-oriented. The political objective of fostering national unity requires a language that may be inculcated in a population as a second language, but the Commission seems to have ignored this objective in pursuit of consensus. The result has therefore been characterized as an academic exercise of restoring a former state of the language by the comparative method. Rather than starting from commonality amongst dialects, the Commission sought difference instead.

Since Middle Chinese possessed a much more complex consonantal system than any modern dialect, students of Standard Mandarin are required to memorize distinctions in words that are homophonous in not only their own but most dialects to date.

A study done in 1989 found that even radio and television news readers are mostly not free from errors when broadcasting in Standard Mandarin.

See also

• Republic of China