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8 statements · 25% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations
On other databases
4 identifiers linking Mandarin across the web's reference databases
8 statements · 25% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations
4 identifiers linking Mandarin across the web's reference databases
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0
Mandarin was the common spoken language of administration of the Chinese empire during the Ming and Qing dynasties. It arose as a practical measure, due to 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 and early Qing eras, but a form based on the Beijing dialect became dominant 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.
1 linked to Mandarin in Wikidata