Chinese

Why the standard took Beijing pronunciation

In 1909 the Qing education ministry proclaimed imperial Mandarin the national language. After the Republic of China was founded in 1912, a Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation published a Dictionary of National Pronunciation in 1919, with a hybrid pronunciation that matched no one's speech. In 1932 a new Vocabulary of National Pronunciation for Everyday Use normalised every character to the Beijing dialect. In 1956 the People's Republic defined the standard as Beijing phonology, the Northern dialects as base, and the grammar of exemplary modern vernacular writing.

How each name was chosen

Guoyu was borrowed from Japan. The Japanese Diet set up a National Language Research Council in 1902 to standardise kokugo, and Qing reformers took the term into Chinese. Putonghua dates to 1906 and was adopted officially in 1955. The term avoids calling the standard a 'national language', to lessen the impression that minorities were being made to take up the majority's speech. In Taiwan, laws of 2017 and 2018 recognised the Formosan languages and Hakka as languages of the nation alongside Standard Chinese, and there have since been efforts to stretch Guoyu to cover all of them.

What official status means in each place

In China the National Common Language and Writing Law of 2000 defines Putonghua as the common language and requires the state to promote it. A Ministry of Education survey found 53.06% of the population could communicate in it in 2007; the government reported over 80% by 2020.

Hong Kong and Macau are diglossic: Cantonese is spoken and a local written vernacular Chinese is written, and since their handovers their governments have used Standard Chinese to deal with the central government. In Taiwan Standard Chinese spread after 1949, and under martial law from 1949 to 1987 the use of Hokkien and other varieties was discouraged or forbidden. In Singapore Mandarin is one of four official languages with English, Malay and Tamil, promoted since the late 1970s by the Speak Mandarin Campaign.

Which characters write it

Standard Chinese is written in characters that correspond to syllables, most of them to a morpheme. Words with no classical counterpart borrow an unrelated character of similar sound, as zhè, 'this', borrowed 這, or get a new compound character. The PRC and several other governments use simplified forms, so 這裏 became 这里, while Taiwan writes traditional characters. Text was once read top to bottom and right to left, and now usually runs left to right.