Learning Chinese today, in the third millennium, means learning PuTongHua, i.e., "standard" Mandarin, but few people know that hundreds of languages are spoken in China-which for socio-political reasons are called dialects over there-and that each of them in turn has several variants.
To refer to Chinese as a language is reductive as well as incorrect. In fact, Chinese is a large and composite language family, consisting of hundreds of deeply different language varieties. To understand it, one Chinese speaker of Cantonese cannot understand another who uses the Beijing dialect, and vice versa.
How many languages are spoken in China?
So how many languages are spoken in China? Without counting all the dialect subgroups, we can say that 302 languages are spoken in China. In the People's Republic of China it is common to say that the average accent changes every three miles you travel. And we are not that far from reality.
Why isn't one language spoken in China?
Why is there more than just one language, Chinese, spoken in China? The reasons lie in the boundless expanse of its territory and topography. China, in fact, is huge. We are talking about more than 9.5 million square kilometers that, before national unification in 1911, were ruled for thousands of years by different dynasties. What's more, rivers and mountain ranges abound in this gigantic piece of land, which means that people from different regions, though bordering each other, were never able to come into contact with each other, and thus ended up giving rise to language basins of their own.
Although politicians and scholars were aware of the importance of unifying the country linguistically, a decision in this direction was not made until 1911, when Mandarin was chosen as the official language of China and it was thus determined that everyone should speak it. But why was Mandarin specifically chosen?
The Birth of Modern Standard Chinese
You may have heard of Mandarin. After all, it is the largest Chinese language group and the nation's official language. Mandarin is spoken by 71% of Chinese people. But did you know that there are so many ways of speaking Mandarin that people often struggle to understand each other even in the same province?
This is because Mandarin has as many as 93 dialects. The reason, again, lies in the vastness of the territory in which it is spoken and the influences the language has undergone over the centuries, especially along the borders. People in the north live near speakers of Altaic languages, a large language family that includes as many as 60 languages spoken in the Central Asian area by some 250 million people, while the Chinese in the south have been subjected to the totally different linguistic influences such as those in Thailand.
The modern version of Mandarin is actually based on the way people speak in a small town called Wanping, about 200 kilometers from Beijing. Linguists went there in the 1950s to study the way speech was articulated and then used those results to standardize the pronunciation of Mandarin, with some modifications to make it easier for non-native speakers to learn.
Why was Mandarin chosen as the official language?
Many of the founders of Sun Yat-sen's Kuomingtang Party, the father of modern China, were Cantonese and originally from what is now Guangzhou, with the result that much of the early political activity was conducted in that dialect.
When the new republic was established in 1911, Kuomingtang briefly considered the feasibility of using Cantonese as a national language, but soon had to shelve the idea, for two main reasons:
1. Cantonese is a very difficult language to learn.
2. Mandarin was much more widespread than Cantonese as early as 1911. Almost everyone north of the Yellow River could at least understand Mandarin, including the entire province of Sichuan.
After all, Mandarin is standard Chinese because it has a common denominator, enabling everyone to communicate with each other effectively. Hence the term "PuTongHua," which literally means "universal/common dialect." This is essentially an evolution of the term "GuoYu," which means "national language" introduced by the Republican government, which in turn is derived from "GuanHua" or "court dialect" used by the Qing and Ming courts.
Mandarin is a convenient tool agreed upon by all as the national language, but it has no greater inherent superiority or authenticity than any other Chinese dialect.
In fact, in part, it is an artificial construct, being derived
from the various northern dialects, mainly from the areas around Beijing, with some modification added to make it more assimilable for non-native speakers. In historical terms, there are no "native" Mandarin speakers, although a large proportion of northern Chinese speak dialects that are anthropologically similar to what we now call "standard" Mandarin.
Marketing Team Congressi Internazionali
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