Old Mandarin

Old Mandarin or Early Mandarin was the speech of northern China during the Jurchen-ruled Jin dynasty and the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty (12th to 14th centuries). New genres of vernacular literature were based on this language, including verse, drama and story forms, such as the qu and sanqu.

The phonology of Old Mandarin has been inferred from the ʼPhags-pa script, an alphabet created in 1269 for several languages of the Mongol empire, including Chinese, and from two rime dictionaries, the Menggu Ziyun (1308) and the Zhongyuan Yinyun (1324). The rhyme books differ in some details but show many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects, such as the reduction and disappearance of final stops and the reorganization of the four tones of Middle Chinese.