Mandarin Language

Mandarin is the most commonly spoken dialect of the Chinese family of languages. It is also the most spoken language in the world, with about 850 million speakers. The overwhelming majority of Mandarin speakers are located in northern mainland China, but smaller populations of speakers can be found in many nearby countries.

History of Mandarin

Chinese is an ancient language, spoken in China before 1100 B.C.E. The language spoken at that time, however, bore no resemblance to any dialect of the modern Chinese language family and is now known as Old Chinese. Over the next several thousand years, numerous dialects and other vernaculars of Old Chinese developed throughout China. These eventually became so unique unto themselves that no speakers of any particular dialect could understand speakers of another, or even the common Old Chinese base from which all of these dialects had developed.

Mandarin Chinese was one such dialect that arose, at the earliest scholarly estimate, around 1100 C.E., following the demise of the Northern Song dynasty. Other academics place Mandarin's origin in the mid-1300s, when members of the Ming Dynasty elite would have adopted the new dialect as their own official language, to separate themselves from commoners who spoke other dialects.

In any case, Mandarin evolved into several styles through the medieval and early modern periods until it eventually became the standard version known today. The Chinese government had not decreed any of the many Chinese dialects as the official language of the country, with even government and legal documents being written in whatever dialect the author used. In 1912, however, the Republic of China established itself as a new nation and named Mandarin as its official language. Following the Communist revolution, the new People's Republic of China retained Mandarin as its official language. The Chinese government in the capital of Beijing conducts all official business in Mandarin.

Classification of Mandarin

Modern Mandarin is classified as a member of a separate branch of the Sino-Tibetan family of languages. These are all the languages, and their many dialects, spoken in China and its surrounding countries and regions, including Burma, Nepal, and Tibet.

Mandarin has long been described as an exceptionally difficult language for non-native speakers to learn. This is due to its many fundamental differences from the ways in which European languages are spoken. One of the most important core elements of spoken Mandarin is its tonality. This refers to the variety of meanings that can be derived from one Mandarin word based on the pitch of the speaker. Without these tones, Mandarin could not fully function as a language.

For example, the Mandarin word ma can refer to four entirely different concepts, depending on the pitch of the speaker. Ma spoken with a high pitch means "mother," while spoken with a rising pitch means "hemp." A falling-rising pitch means "horse," and a falling pitch means "scold."

Another defining characteristic of Mandarin—and its many related Chinese dialects—that sets it apart from Western languages is its grammar. Mandarin is an isolating language, which means that words possess only one form and pronunciation despite the variety of functions they can serve in a sentence.

A Mandarin word in the present tense, for example, is articulated the same way as in the past tense; no prefixes or suffixes of the kind that characterize a language such as English are used to indicate function in Mandarin. Instead, Mandarin speakers make known the intent of their statements by their specific ordering of particles, prepositions, and other such mechanical sentence parts. Related to word order is the placement of words to announce sentence topics: Mandarin speakers state the subjects of their sentences before "commenting" on them, as in the sentence "This book I have read."

Mandarin also possesses a number of unique word-building devices to simplify the addition of new concepts into the language. One example is compounding, which combines two words into one word that comes to mean the sum of the individual words. For instance, Mandarin speakers combine the words for "fire" and "vehicle" to indicate the concept of "train."

Almost identical to this is borrowing, in which Mandarin combines two existing concepts to articulate a new foreign word, such as the combination of "electricity" and "speech" to mean "telephone." This is done because the Chinese language family generally does not use loanwords from foreign languages.

Written Mandarin uses the original set of Chinese characters that was created in the second or third millennium B.C.E. The system of about forty thousand characters includes pictographs, ideographs, and many compounds of these. Chinese characters do not correspond to spoken words, as Chinese writing and speech developed independently of each other. In the 1950s, the Chinese government created a Romanized version of Mandarin called Pinyin, which is used to transliterate Chinese characters into the Latin alphabet for use in the Western world.

Geographic Distribution and Modern Usage

Mandarin is the most widely spoken Chinese dialect and is the official language of the People's Republic of China. It is used mostly in northern and southwestern China, where it can be divided into five distinct dialects. The four main dialects are Northern, Northwestern, Southwestern, and Yangtze River Mandarin. These are extremely similar to one another, and each can be interpreted by speakers of the other Mandarin dialects. The fifth dialect is known as the Beijing dialect. It is specific to the urban center of Beijing and is the type of Mandarin used as the official language of government. In China it is known as Putonghua.

Outside these large swaths of mainland China, Mandarin is also spoken in numerous nearby countries. In Taiwan, Mandarin is called Guoyu, and in Singapore it is called Huayu. Aside from these mainly Mandarin-speaking nations, the language is also spoken in communities of varying sizes in Brunei, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Russia, Thailand, and several other Southeast Asian countries. Mandarin is also spoken in some areas of the United Kingdom and the United States. With about 850 million speakers, Mandarin is the most commonly spoken language in the world.

Bibliography

"Chinese Language History." Foreign Translations. Foreign Translations. Web. 28 July 2015. https://www.foreigntranslations.com/languages/chinese-translation/chinese-language-history/

"Language Overview: Mandarin." One Hour Translation. One Hour Translation. Web. 28 July 2015. https://www.onehourtranslation.com/translation/blog/language-overview-mandarin

"Mandarin." UCLA Language Materials Project. UCLA International Institute. Web. 28 July 2015. http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/Profile.aspx?LangID=78&menu=004

Thompson, Irene. "Mandarin (Chinese)." About World Languages. Technology Development Group. 29 Mar. 2015. Web. 28 July 2015. http://aboutworldlanguages.com/mandarin#dialects