| 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. |