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Mandarin (late Imperial Lingua Franca)
Mandarin () was the common spoken language of administration of the Chinese empire during the Ming and Qing dynasties. It arose as a practical measure, to circumvent the mutual unintelligibility of the varieties of Chinese spoken in different parts of China. Knowledge of this language was thus essential for an official career, but it was never formally defined. The language was a koiné based on Mandarin dialects. The southern variant spoken around Nanjing was prevalent in the late Ming era, although later on a form based on the Beijing dialect took the stage by the mid-19th century and developed into Standard Chinese in the 20th century. In some 19th-century works, it was called the court dialect. History By the late imperial period, local varieties of Chinese had diverged to the extent that people from different provinces could not understand one another. In order to facilitate communication between officials from different provinces, and between officials and the inhabitant ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sinitic Languages
The Sinitic languages (漢語族/汉语族), often synonymous with "Chinese languages", are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute the major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there is a primary split between the Sinitic languages and the rest of the family (the Tibeto-Burman languages). This view is rejected by a number of researchers but has found phylogenetic support among others. The Greater Bai languages, whose classification is difficult, may be an offshoot of Old Chinese and thus Sinitic; otherwise Sinitic is defined only by the many varieties of Chinese unified by a common writing system, and usage of the term "Sinitic" may reflect the linguistic view that Chinese constitutes a family of distinct languages, rather than variants of a single language. Population The total speakers of the Chinese macrolanguage is 1,521,943,700, of which about 73.5% (1,118,584,040) speak a Mandarin variety. The estimated number of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
