Mandarin language

The Mandarin language (traditional Chinese 官話, simplified 官话; pinyin Guānhuà) has the most speakers in the world - approximately 900,000,000, or about a seventh of the planet's population. Most speakers live in China, where there are various forms of Mandarin, from the Beijing-based standard to close varieties in and around the Chinese capital city and those more distantly related towards the south and centre of the country. Many other Chinese learn the language at school, making it the lingua franca of the Chinese-speaking world, and increasingly people from much further afield are coming to Mandarin as a second or foreign language. Exact figures for the number of speakers vary depending on how close the speakers' native or non-native form is to the speech of northern China; often what is labelled 'Mandarin' may linguistically be more like a separate language.

The term Chinese language very often refers to Mandarin, though in Chinese culture this is the name for all varieties of Chinese, many of which constitute separate languages on linguistic grounds. 'Standard Chinese' usually means Standard Mandarin, which is based on a dialect once spoken by the educated elites of Beijing. Mandarin is an official language in China, including Taiwan, and also in Singapore.

Grammar

The following sections refer to Standard Mandarin.

Phonology

Tone

The phonology of Mandarin is well-studied as a textbook example of a tone language, where variations in pitch are all that is necessary to distinguish one word or syllable from another in meaning, as well as the more familiar distinctions made through contrasting phonemes. There are four tones in Mandarin, so the following are minimal pairs: 妈 mā (high-level tone, 'ma' as in 'mama'), 麻 má (high-rising, 'hemp'), 马 mǎ (fall-rise, 'horse') and 骂 mà (falling, 'scold'). A well-known example sentence including these four meanings is: māma qi mǎ, mǎ chi má, māma mà mǎ (妈妈骑马,马吃麻,妈妈骂马 'mother rides a horse, the horse eats hemp, mother scolds the horse').

Syllable structure

Most Mandarin syllables end with a vowel, with only the nasal consonants [n], [ŋ] permitted syllable-finally (and, for some speakers, [r]). The nasals are arguably a single phoneme which vary depending on whether the preceding vowel is pronounced towards the front or back of the mouth, i.e. /n/ surfaces as [ŋ] after a back vowel. Both and [m] can be syllabic, usually in interjections. A single consonant only is permitted as the beginning or 'onset' of the syllable; this position cannot be left unfilled. Words usually have one or two syllables. The claims that Mandarin is a basically monosyllabic language, and that it gained many disyllabic words through compounding to compensate for final 'coda' consonants of the syllable disappearing, are disputed. Disyllabic words have long been possible in Mandarin, often as variants of monosyllabic words: mei-tan 'coal-charcoal' does not mean 'coal and charcoal', but just 'coal'. Furthermore, homophones can be disambiguated by context, and many disyllabic words are of relative recent coinage, appearing centuries after the loss of many final consonants.