[jacobolus]

The language we call Mandarin has been the native language of some parts of northern China for thousands of years, and was certainly not “created” any time recently. Some people speaking dialects of that language migrated to other parts of China. But there are various other languages natively spoken elsewhere in the country.

Singapore is a cosmopolitan port city, there are several Chinese languages spoken there, and Mandarin was not the dominant one until recently. There are also many other languages spoken in Singapore, and from what I understand English is the primary language used for official business. Taiwan was not natively Mandarin speaking but speaks it now because it was taken over (from the Japanese) by the fleeing Mandarin-speaking KMT after they were beaten militarily by the Communists during the Chinese Civil War. Both Singapore and Taiwan were ruled for decades by authoritarian governments. I’m not sure about Singapore but in Taiwan other Chinese languages were forcefully suppressed.

Plenty of other parts of the world manage to communicate across regional/national borders without restricting people’s ability to produce/distribute local media in their native languages.

There are many countries where students learn several languages in school (including their native regional language and a national language) from an early age.

(Disclaimer again: I’m not an expert in the history, politics, or comparative linguistics of China. I recommend Wikipedia as a better first summary, if you are curious to learn about these subjects.)

[echevil]

If you can read Chinese, the Chinese versions of wikipedia page on Mandarin Chinese has a lot more detail on its origination: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/普通话

If you cannot, I found an English article for you: http://www.alittledynasty.com/history-of-mandarin-chinese.ht...

To summarize, Mandarin is not created out of nothing for sure, but the concept of "Mandarin Chinese" (or rather, Standard Chinese) started with an effort of newly established Republic of China in 1913, to develop a standard phonetic system and to use as the national language in China. They later published the standard around 1920s, which is essentially a modified version of phonetic system used in Beijing. The dialect now spoken in Beijing is very close to Mandarin, but not exactly the same.

I grew up in China and lived in Singapore for a long time. I can tell you for sure, that the different dialects spoken by Chinese should not be confused with completely different languages. First of all they share the same writing system, the words and syntax we use in various dialects are mostly the same. (Some dialects use a few words differently from others, but that's not surprising at all considering UK english and US english are not exactly the same)

I speak a southern dialect myself which sounds very different from Mandarin. But there is a somewhat systematic mapping from the dialect to Mandarin, so it was really not much an effort to learn Mandarin.

I can imagine there must have been some efforts there to promote the standard in the very beginning, maybe even "forcefully suppressing" other dialects are needed at some point, but considering the huge benefit, it undoubted is the best invention happened in the history of Chinese language.

[_emacsomancer_]

> The language we call Mandarin has been the native language of some parts of northern China for thousands of years, and was certainly not “created” any time recently.

In the same way that Hindi has been the native language of northern India for thousands of years (which is to say that while the Mandarin of today has connections to earlier forms of Chinese, it is hardly a monolithic, unchanging remnant of thousands of years ago).

[HumanDrivenDev]

> I’m not sure about Singapore but in Taiwan other Chinese languages were forcefully suppressed.

Singapore was much more successful in suppressing Hokkien than Taiwan was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speak_Mandarin_Campaign

[echevil]

Yes, there was a promotion to speak Mandarin, but suppression of dialects was never a major part of the campaign and Hokkien is still spoken by many Singaporean.

[HumanDrivenDev]

> but suppression of dialects was never a major part of the campaign

From the article:

The initial goal of the campaign was for all young Chinese to stop speaking dialects in five years, and to establish Mandarin as the language of choice in public places within 10 years.

> Hokkien is still spoken by many Singaporean.

Again, the article shows that in 1980 81.4% of Chinese Singaporeans spoke a Chinese language at home that wasn't Mandarin. In 2015 it's 16.1%.

[echevil]

Please search for "suppression of dialects was never a MAJOR part" in the original article for more details. I copied the exact sentence from there.

Yes, there are much less Singaporeans speaking their dialects at home. I've actually met several Singaporeans saying that want to speak their dialects as much as possible as they feel it's endangered. However, what are the alternatives? Singaporean Chinese doesn't speak the same dialect, and it's a small city. How do they communicate with each other in school, at work, and at home after marrying someone speaking a different dialect? They can speak English, in fact they do that as well, or they can speak Mandarin if they're communicating with another Chinese speaker. Either way, the chance they'll be able to speak their own dialects will diminish eventually.

In addition, most dialects are no where close to being endangered, as they're widely used in China. We speak in Mandarin with people that doesn't speak the same dialect, but at the same time, it'd also be weird if we are from the same place, speak the same dialect and yet decide to speak in Mandarin.

[HumanDrivenDev]

Well one advantage is that Singaporean employers can put on superfluous "must speak Mandarin" sentences in their job descriptions, which lets them hire Chinese people and avoid hiring Malay and Indians, all the while landing on the right side of anti-discrimination laws.

Hard to do that when lots of people speak Hokkien, Cantonese etc.

[echevil]

English is the official language used in formal context in Singapore, not Chinese, Indian or Malay. All the documents you’d sign with a company are in English.