How Mandarin Conquered China: the 100+ year battle for language unity

✍️ SYNOPSIS: The complete history of Mandarin Chinese, from 官话 (guanhua) to Putonghua.

📍TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 || Intro
0:30 || One Nation, Too Many Languages
2:50 || Brief History of Court Language 官話
7:15 || Creation of the National Language 國語
14:15 || Rise of Putonghua - Mandarin Chinese 普通话
19:09 || What happens to China's minor languages?
21:30 || The Future of Mandarin Chinese

▶️ History of Pinyin:    • Why Chinese Created an ALPHABET  
▶️ Simplification of Chinese:    • When They Nearly KILLED Chinese  

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⚠️ NOTES:
Note 1: “Mandarin” or “Mandarin Chinese” used in this video refer to Putonghua and not the Mandarin family of Chinese languages as a whole. Putonghua and Mandarin Chinese (modern definition) are used interchangeably in this video. Putonghua and Guoyu (in Taiwan) are mostly identical except for minor pronunciation differences.

Note 2: I use the term “dialect” in comparisons between 2 Chinese languages of similar origin, such as comparing 官话 of the North vs the South. The term “accent” or “pronunciation" is used to stress differences in standard pronunciation, such as 北音 vs 南音.

Note 3: “Court language” is not a standard term for Guanhua (官话): it’s simply what I deemed to be the best English translation. Guanhua is a type of court language, or bureaucratic language.

Note 4: 中原 (zhōng yuán) is a highly arable region in central China, thought to be the birthplace of Chinese civilization.

Note 5: The term Guanhua (官话) first appeared in the Ming dynasty, although contemporary historians sometimes group older government languages under the same term, such as Yayan (雅言).

Note 6: Baihua (白话) is the term for the spoken colloquial. The text at 6:42 is a line from a text called《鱼我所欲也》by Mengzi (Mencius).

Note 7: Manchu is the language of the Manchurian ethnicity, while the Chinese language is the language of the Han ethnicity. Both had coexisted throughout the Qing dynasty, but Chinese slowly prevailed over Manchu.

Note 8: 读音统一会 had 80 delegates: 2 from each province, 1 each from Mongolia, Tibet and 1 for overseas Chinese.

Note 9: Nationalism was THE most important political agenda in the early 1900s. Following decades of unfair treaties and the power vacuum left by the fallen Qing dynasty, many people (some on opposing sides) all wanted a unified China. This is the heart of why the KMT wanted a unified language.

Note 10: Here is a map of China’s geography showing the Northern plains and Southern hills: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geograp...

MORE NOTES HERE (I'm out of space): https://docs.google.com/document/d/15...

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