Standard Chinese is a standard form of Mandarin Chinese with official status in the People's Republic of China (where the language is known as "common speech" Putonghua 普通话), the Republic of China (Taiwan) (where it is called "National language" Guoyu 國語), and Singapore (which names it Huayu 华语 or "Chinese language"). Various governing authorities in the course of the 20th century adopted this variety of Chinese as a standard register and promoted its use, giving it its current status as a standard language.
While earlier Chinese lingua francas based on the dialects of previous Chinese capitals had existed in Chinese history, the Modern Standard Mandarin which gained prominence in the 19th century is based on the dialect of Beijing, with some modifications.
Background
The Chinese language has always consisted of a wide variety of dialects; hence prestige dialects and linguae francae have always been needed. Confucius () referred to yayan 'elegant speech' modeled on the dialect of the Zhou dynasty royal lands rather than regional dialects; texts authored during the Han dynasty (202 BC220 AD) also refer to tongyu ( 'common language'). Rime dictionaries written since the Southern and Northern dynasties (420–589) likely also reflected systems of standard pronunciation. However, these standard dialects were largely unknown outside of the educated elite; even among the elite, pronunciations may have differed widely; this was enabled by the unifying factor of Literary Chinese as a written standard regardless of the dialect spoken. The rime dictionaries placed great emphasis on preserving archaic features that had been lost in contemporary speech. Therefore, the standards in these dictionaries did not reflect a single dialect spoken at any one point of time but were always composites of features from different sources to reflect an ideal pronunciation. The language of the literate ruling class was known as yayan (Zhou), tongyu (Han dynasty), and guanyun (Sui, Tang and Song dynasties), and mastery of these linguistic standards were necessary for upward advancement.
Apart from the common language, local varieties of Chinese, especially in Southern China, also developed their own distinct literary readings. These are spoken pronunciations for written Chinese based on the prestige dialect at each point in history (e.g. Luoyang, Chang'an, or Beijing). Throughout the history of Chinese, educated people would be trained in their formal education to read aloud using these pronunciations based on the prestige dialect.
Yuan dynasty North China developed a lingua franca known as Han'er Yuyan. Yuan era scholar Zhou Deqing published a book detailing a standard spoken Chinese, named Zhongyuan Yayin (Elegant pronunciation of the Central Plains), meant to represent the common spoken language rather than the "correct" literary pronunciation reflected in the Song dictionaries. This book became the standard speech of northern Chinese theatre forms. During the flight of the Song literati to the South after the Jurchen conquest, Neo-Confucians began to fixate on the idea of restoring "correct" pronunciation as it was believed to be spoken by the ancients. As a result, the subsequent rime dictionaries such as the Ming dynasty's Hongwu Zhengyun 洪武正韵 reflected the "ideal" pronunciations and deviated from the actual spoken pronunciations. This idealised standard differed from the Yuan dynasty's Zhongyuan Yayin which more closely reflected contemporary speech.
Ming scholar Lu Kun criticised the Hongwu Zhengyun as too distant from the "elegant pronunciation of middle China" and was not actually spoken by court officials. The actual court lingua franca from the Ming dynasty was rather based on the Nanjing dialect with some other non-Jianghuai Mandarin influences. The Ming (1368–1644) and Qing dynasties (1644–1912) began to use the term Guanhua () 'official speech' to refer to the dialect used at the courts. The existence of Guanhua was already known to Europeans by the time of Matteo Ricci, who worked in China from 1582 to 1610. Ricci wrote of "a spoken language common to the whole Empire, known as the Quonhua, an official language for civil and forensic use".Translation of
Emergence of a Beijing-based standard
Qing era origins
It seems that during the early part of this period, the standard was based on the Nanjing dialect, but later the Beijing dialect became increasingly influential, despite the mix of officials and commoners speaking various dialects in the capital, Beijing. Unlike other forms of Mandarin, Beijing phonology is notable for redistributing the ancient checked tone syllables with voiceless initials into all other tones in a seemingly random fashion, rather than maintaining the original tonal categories. Linguists suggest that the reassignment of the checked tone syllables indicates dialectal admixture: verbs and colloquialisms tend towards yinping tone (as in Ji-Lu Mandarin), standalone nouns favour shang (similar to Northeastern Mandarin), while literary pronunciations have qu or yangping (the former seemingly an attempt to imitate Nanjing, the latter probably based on Central Plains Mandarin). Many of these yinping and yangping pronunciations first appeared in the 19th or early 20th century, replacing older pronunciations.
Beijing Mandarin was heavily influenced by the language of the Manchu elite of Beijing; Beijing Mandarin contained a number of Manchu grammatical features that could not be found in other forms of Mandarin. Due to the Manchu influences in Beijing Mandarin, late Qing Manchus (who frequently could not speak Manchu) took Beijing dialect as their mother tongue, setting them apart from provincials and even from the Han Bannermen, who retained a Liaodong dialect.
Despite the shift from Nanjing to Beijing-based pronunciation, the ascendant Beijing Mandarin largely followed the syntax of earlier forms of Guanhua. Beijing Mandarin () was considered to be distinct from the Beijing dialect (, "speech of the capital"), and Beijing Mandarin was also divided between the more colloquial "true Mandarin" () and the more ceremonial "cultured speech" (). This historical "Beijing Mandarin" was quite close to modern Standard Chinese. The baihua (vernacular) grammar and the vocabulary of the historical Mandarin was largely the same as in modern Standard Chinese. On the other hand, the historical Mandarin language used many honorifics which have mostly disappeared in modern-day Mandarin daily speech, such as jian ( '[my] humble') and guì ( '[your] honorable').
Shift in pronunciation standards Until the late Qing period, the official standard in books and manuals was still a synthetic Mandarin with classical features such as the checked tone that were preserved only in Southern China. Only one author, Gao Jingting, spoke of Beijing as the standard, although his 1810 book simply depicted Beijing idioms spoken with the synthetic pronunciation. However, in court practice, Beijing Mandarin had replaced the "elegant pronunciation of the Central Plain" as the pronunciation of court ceremonies by the 18th century. For instance, in 1752, the Court of State Ceremonial decided to recruit officials only from the graduates of Zhili (modern Hebei), and particularly Shuntian Prefecture, around Beijing, for their pronunciation. In 1728, the Qing authorities set up orthoepy academies () in an attempt to make pronunciation conform to the court standard, as the Yongzheng Emperor had complained about his difficulty understanding court officials from the southern provinces Guangdong and Fujian. These attempts generated some interest in Mandarin instruction in the south, driving a wave of Mandarin textbook publishing and children's lessons. However, most academies closed down rapidly, with only one exception in Shaowu which lasted until the 1890s. Ethnic Manchus and other Bannermen formed the primary pool of language teachers and textbook compilers since the Yongzheng edict on language instruction. Still, Thomas Taylor Meadows observed that knowledge of Mandarin had become widespread in 1840s Guangzhou, even among the lower classes. Nevertheless, the fact that the court language was different from the classical standards affected its prestige; Yuen Ren Chao's family reportedly considered Beijing speech as a "maidservant language", while southern Chinese scholars pointed out that their speech was closer to classical pronunciation and better for studying Confucian classics.
Foreign observers continued to esteem southern variants of Mandarin over Beijing's. The 1703 missionary grammar book Arte de La Lengua Mandarina still treated Beijing Mandarin as a local variant of Mandarin, and the 1716 Japanese textbook Tōwa Sanyō declared Nanjing Mandarin and Hangzhou dialect as the prestige dialects of Chinese. As late as 1815, Robert Morrison based the first English–Chinese dictionary on the lower Yangtze koiné as the standard of the time, though he conceded that the Beijing variant was gaining in influence.