Mandarin dialects

Mandarin (官话方言，old: 北方方言), when used in the broad sense to refer to most of the Chinese dialects spoken over northern and southwestern China, covers many variations. This is manifested in two ways:

# Various dialects of Mandarin cover a huge area containing nearly a billion people. As a result, there are pronounced regional variations in pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar encountered as one moves from place to place. These regional differences are as pronounced as (or more so than) the regional versions of the English language found in England, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Canada, and the United States. A northeastern dialect speaker and a southwestern dialect speaker can hardly communicate.
# Standard Mandarin has been promoted very actively by the PRC, the ROC, and Singapore as a second language. As a result, native speakers of both Mandarin varieties and non-Mandarin Chinese varieties frequently flavor it with a strong infusion of the speech sounds of their native tongues. Spoken Taiwanese Mandarin, for instance, has become a fairly consistent variant of standard Mandarin as defined by educational authorities. Mandarin is also sometimes imprecisely referred to as Beijingese ("Běijīng huà" or "Běijīng fāngyán"), or a "Beijing drawl" "Jīng piànzi" (京片子). Taiwanese sometimes using the term "Beijing hua" instead of "Guoyu" (which literally means "the national language"), especially for those people who advocate that Taiwanese should be one of their official languages.

Dialect division

Generally speaking, the local pronunciations of people from other Mandarin-speaking areas depart more and more from the standard as distance from Beijing increases. Some areas, such as Heilongjiang, have pronunciations that are not significantly different from the standard, though this is the exception rather than the rule. Cities very close to Beijing, such as Tianjin, Baoding, Shenyang, or Dalian, already have pronunciations that are markedly different. In general Mandarin can be divided into the following dialect areas:

* Beijing and environs, such as Chengde, Hebei. The basis of Standard Mandarin. Areas of recent large-scale immigration such as northern Xinjiang speak Standard Mandarin or something very close to it; hence the dialects of those areas are also classified as within the Beijing dialect group.
* Northeastern, or that spoken in the northeast of China (or what the West knows as Manchuria), except the Liaodong Peninsula
* Ji-Lu, or that spoken in Hebei ("Ji") and Shandong ("Lu") provinces, except the Jiaodong Peninsula
* Jiao-Liao , or that spoken in Shandong (Jiaodong) Peninsula and Liaodong Peninsula
* Zhongyuan ("lit." central plain), or that spoken in Henan province, the central parts of Shaanxi in the Yellow River valley, and southern Xinjiang
* Lan-Yin, or that spoken in Gansu province (with capital Lanzhou) and Ningxia autonomous region (with capital Yinchuan), as well as northern Xinjiang. The Dungan language, a Chinese-derived language spoken in Kyrgyzstan, also belongs to this category
* Southwestern, or that spoken in the provinces of Hubei, Sichuan, Guizhou, Yunnan, and the Mandarin-speaking areas of Guangxi
* Jiang-huai (or Xia-jiang), spoken in the parts of Jiangsu and Anhui on the north bank of the Yangtze, as well as some areas on the south bank, such as Nanjing, Jiangsu; Jiujiang, Jiangxi; etc.

In addition, Jin is sometimes categorized under Mandarin, as the Qin-jin subdivision. However, current practice tends to set it apart as a separate division on equal footing with Mandarin.

See List of Chinese dialects for a comprehensive listing of major Chinese dialects, including Mandarin dialects.

Phonology

Due to differences in pronunciation, not all variations of spoken Mandarin are readily mutually intelligible. Specifically, according to SIL International [http://www.ethnologue.org/show_language.asp?code=CHN] :

:"Mandarin varieties in the Lower Plateau in Shaanxi are not readily intelligible with Putonghua [Standard Mandarin] . Mandarin varieties of Guilin and Kunming are inherently unintelligible to speakers of Putonghua."

In addition, persons speaking forms of Mandarin which are not completely intelligible with Standard Mandarin will often conceptualize their speech as distinct from Standard Mandarin. Educated speakers of the official language of instruction living in southwestern cities such as Guilin and Kunming will be found to speak quite adequate Standard Mandarin, as well as their own mother tongue. However, they will conceptualize their mother tongue to be different from Standard Mandarin.

In addition, it is not uncommon for two speakers who both think of themselves as speaking Standard Mandarin to find it difficult to understand each other.

Initials

A generalized table for the initials of the Mandarin dialects is as follows. Initials not present in Standard Mandarin are inside parentheses.

Tone contour variation:

* Dialects in and around the Nantong area typically have many more than 4 tones, due to influence from the neighbouring Wu dialects.

Vocabulary

In general, the greatest variation occurs in slang, in kinship terms, in names for common crops and domesticated beasts, for common verbs and adjectives, and other such everyday terms. The least variation occurs in "formal" vocabulary -- terms dealing with science, law, or government.

Northeastern Mandarin, in particular, has a number of borrowings from Altaic languages not shared by other varieties of Mandarin.

Grammar

Sentence-final particles

Especially prominent in conversational Chinese, sentence-final particles alter the inherent meaning of a sentence by changing its sentence construction. Much like vocabulary (of which it is a hyponym of), particles can vary a great deal with regards to the locale. For example, the particle 嘛 (ma), which is used in most northern regionalects to denote obviousness or contention, is replaced by 哟 (yo) for southern usage. More examples persist in everyday colloquialism.

Reduplication

One feature of southwestern Mandarin is its frequent use of noun reduplication, which is almost not used in standard Mandarin. In Sichuan, one hears "baobao" "handbag" whereas Beijing uses "bao'r".

Mandarin and the Educational System

In both Mainland China and Taiwan, Mandarin is taught by immersion starting in elementary school. After the second grade, the entire educational system is in Mandarin, except for local language classes that have been taught for a few hours each week in Taiwan starting in the mid-1990s.

Social Implications

In northern China, Sichuan, and other areas where the "Northern" language is spoken, the local variations of Mandarin are the mother tongues of most of the people who live in those regions. The era of mass education in Mandarin has not erased these earlier regional differences. In the south, the interaction between Mandarin and local variations of Chinese has produced local versions of the "Northern" language that are rather different from that official standard Mandarin in both pronunciation and grammar. For example, the Mandarin spoken in Taiwan by students who speak Taiwanese (a dialect of Southern Min) or Hakka as their mother tongue is usually spoken with a grammar and accent that renders it different from the Kuoyu standard, creating a version of Mandarin commonly known as Taiwanese Mandarin. Similarly in Singapore, the multi-cultural populance as well as large representative groups of various southern Chinese dialect groups has resulted in modifications to its own version of Mandarin.

Although Mandarin is considered the standard dialect, speaking Mandarin without the local accent or speaking Mandarin instead of the local dialect can mark a person as being an outsider or as someone who is not "a regular guy." Thus most Chinese, including Chinese political leaders themselves, do not bother to learn to speak Mandarin with the official standard accent. In some cases, such as with both Mao Zedong, whose native dialect was Xiang (linguistics) and Chiang Kai-Shek, whos native dialect was Wu (linguistics), this results in the political leaders' speech being largely unintelligible to large numbers of Chinese. One other consequence of this linguistic diversity, is that Chinese politics does not have a strong tradition of speech-making and a great amount of political discourse occurs in writing.

External links

* [http://www.glossika.com/en/dict/tones/guanhua.htm Tones in Mandarin Dialects :] Comprehensive tone comparison charts for 523 Mandarin dialects.(Compiled by James Campbell)
* [http://malandrin.org/ Malaysia's own kind of Mandarin dialect ; Northern Mandarin dialect in The South Seas.] :大马华语