Common Speech: How China Invented Their National Language
Do you speak Chinese? If you asked this question to the average person living in Beijing, Hong Kong, Fujian Province, or on the banks of the Yellow River in the 11th Century B.C., the answer would be “yes.” However, it could very well be that none of them would be able to understand the others.
At least in the former three cases, they could probably communicate in Mandarin, the official dialect for all of China. But getting to the point where at least the majority of Chinese people can communicate with each other was not easy. A century ago, “Mandarin” did not exist. This national achievement came only as a result of a heady all-Chinese cocktail of education, technological innovation, government coercion, and inter-regional squabbling.
Before the fall of the Qing (“Ching”) Dynasty in 1911, official business could be done in either of two tongues. Classical Chinese was based on the literary register of the Spring and Autumn Period (771–476 B.C.), and thus of Confucius and the other great sages. Linguistically as well as culturally, its status in China is equivalent to that of Latin in Europe. The other was Manchu, the language of the barbarians who conquered the Middle Kingdom in 1644. However, by the 20th Century, few Qing aristocrats remembered their ancestral tongue. As a result, in an era when the white men and even the Japanese were communicating at the speed of light via telegraph and radio, the world’s largest nation had two official languages, neither of which was spoken by more than 1% of its population.
The situation was basically analogous to Teddy Roosevelt addressing the American people in a mix of Latin and Navajo (though that does kind of seem like something he would do). The Nationalist revolutionaries who overthrew the Qing were determined to make China a modern country, and among the top items on their agenda was to come up with a normal national language.
The problem was that people across the country spoke different “dialects,” which can be as different to one another as English is to Swedish. The most common single one was that of the northern plains, centered on Beijing, but it was widely unpopular because (allegedly) it sounded ugly and was influenced by the barbarian dynasties that had managed to breach the Great Wall over the centuries.
The Nationalists were nothing if not nationalistic, and they determined that a southern dialect would better reflect the new republic’s Chinese character. But the south, with its myriad mountains and rivers, was linguistically balkanised. No dialect predominated enough to justify imposing it on the whole country.
With no good language to choose, the National Language Unification Commission came up with an unorthodox solution: they would just invent a new one. The new Guanhua, or “hybrid pronunciation” system, blended common elements of (mainly southern) dialects, to make it easy to learn for anyone in the country. The Commission had one of its members, Chao Yuen-ren, record helpful daily lessons so everyone could get up to speed in the new national language.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the only man in China willing to go to the trouble of learning the new tongue was Mr. Chao himself. China had gone from having a national language spoken by 1% of its population, to one spoken by 1. After a few months of shambolic rollout, Guanhua was phased out — today, like a sort of Esperanto of the East, it has faded into obscurity, an unknown monument to the futility of making language rational.
At this point, the Republic’s leaders had had enough of linguistic psychodrama. The order came from on high that China would just go with the dialect the most people already spoke — the Beijing dialect was now Guoyu, “National Language,” or Mandarin.
Mandarin’s Western name was coined by Jesuit missionaries like Étienne Fourmont, who in 1742 published a study of the lingua franca used in casual conversation by mandarin bureaucrats from different parts of the empire. As the dialect of the capital, and thus one learned and garbled by people of many backgrounds, it became simpler than other dialects (a process also undergone by languages like English and Latin).
Its grammar streamlined, and words ending in K, P, and T lost those consonants. Modern Mandarin words all end in vowels, N, or NG. Tones, an important feature in all Chinese dialects, merged together, leaving Mandarin with only four, compared to six or more in other dialects. Classic Tang poetry, which was composed in the 7th-9th Centuries in the northern city of Chang’an, sounds better when read in Cantonese, the more conservative dialect of the deep south.
Hyper-simplification left many words with the exact same pronunciation. The aggrieved Mr. Chao, fresh off of writing a dictionary for a language that no longer existed, mocked the new standard register by writing a 94-word poem called “Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den,” using only words pronounced shi (“shir”) — its Mandarin title is Shi-shi Shi Shi Shi (in Cantonese, it would be Sek-sat Si Seh Si). When the government persisted in forcing this uncivilised tongue on the nation, he fled in a huff to Cambridge, Massachusetts.
During years of chaotic civil war and apocalyptic Japanese invasion, the Nationalist government had bigger fish to fry than China’s traditional dialects. But as the Communist Party tightened its grip in the 1950s, language unification rose back to the top of the agenda.
As radio and later television spread, the new government made it illegal for broadcasters to speak anything but Mandarin. In schools nationwide, local dialects were harshly discouraged, which was brutal for the vast majority of kids whose parents did not speak what was now rechristened Putonghua, “Common Speech.” Dramatic depictions of historic figures could only be in one language. This included ancient emperors, who would not understand a word of it, as well as Mr. Mao himself, whom many Chinese grew up hearing all the time, only ever in his native Shaoshan dialect.
The revolution did not stop with spoken language. For millennia, China’s beautiful but arcane characters had been a major hurdle for people who did not have the time and resources to learn the 4,000 or more individual characters needed for general literacy. The Communists originally planned to replace them entirely, either with the Latin alphabet (as the Vietnamese had) or a new system (like the Koreans). However, during Mao’s purge of heterodox scholars in 1957, proponents of both systems found themselves in the awkward position of being critics of a government policy (i.e., using Chinese characters to write). With its leading lights snuffed out, the reform movement fizzled.
The government did eventually undertake a simplification of the characters, which did at least make them much easier to learn. The effort was, from a linguistic point of view, remarkable — even those with limited reading skills (e.g., me) in one system can somehow recognise analogues in the other. But, as with Guanhua and so much else, getting actual speakers on board was another story.
In Mainland China, adoption of Simplified characters was relatively swift and painless, especially compared to that of spoken Mandarin. Things were different across the Taiwan Strait, where the Nationalists had fled. Simplifying characters was originally the Nationalists’ idea, but now that the Communists were doing it, they rejected it as a barbaric affront to Chinese civilisation. In Hong Kong, Macao, and overseas Chinese communities, where the government in Beijing was and remains very unpopular, the new characters were a dead letter.
The journey has been rocky, unpredictable, and sometimes bizarre, but over the past century, a dialect that began as an inelegant lingua franca for ambitious men in one northern metropolis has become the mother tongue of over a billion people worldwide. In Mainland China, the share of the population who speak Mandarin has grown from less than half in 2000, to 81% in 2022.
That still leaves out 270 million people, more than everyone in the United States outside California and Texas. But Mandarin dominates almost all major cities, including Shenzhen, a new megacity that sprung up in the heart of what was traditionally Cantonese country, and Shanghai, where the local dialect is still prevalent, but whose accent of Mandarin is considered by many to be more prestigious than the capital’s.
In Taiwan, Mandarin’s triumph has been even more complete. It is even taking over Singapore, whose population mostly came from southern China long before anyone there had heard the dialect. Hong Kong remains a different story — Mandarin speakers report being harassed or even assaulted on the street, accused of collaborating with Beijing. But in Chinatowns around the world, whose residents generally have little love for the people who imposed the language, many people now speak it.
China’s growing soft power, from economic opportunity to rap music, creates a powerful gravitational pull well beyond the direct control of the Mandarin authorities. The official name of the dialect in the PRC is still Putonghua (“Common Speech”), while in Taiwan, it is still Guoyu (“National Language”). In overseas Chinese communities, mainly in Southeast Asia, it is sometimes Huayu, using a traditional poetic name for China. But today, the more popular native name for Mandarin is simply Hanyu — Chinese.
