[barry-cotter]

Mandarin is 普通话, the common speech, standard Chinese. It is based to a very large extent on what the people of the Northern Plain speak, more specifically those of Beijing. The written form of it, which absolutely is also Mandarin is the form of Chinese which took over from Classical Chinese during the Republic of China.

Traditional and Simplified Charcters are only barely relevant to this. The only spoken varieties of Chinese with vernacular literatures are Mandarin and Cantonese. All writing in Chinese is in one or the other. Even in Hong Kong and Macau the overwhelming majority of writing is in Mandarin. It follows Mandarin grammar and vocabulary and can be read without any special difficulty by Mandarin monoglots. Written Cantonese is basically unintelligible to them. It’s used for songs, occasionally subtitling, a very small corpus of fiction and dialogue in court transcripts and scripts. This is orthogonal to the use of Traditional or Simplified characters. You can write any of the dialects of Serbo-Croatian in Latin or Cyrillic characters. That doesn’t make any of them Russian, or German.

[PakG1]

It may be true that Mandarin is based to a very large extent on what the people of the Northern Plain speak, more specifically those of Beijing. I have no idea, but I've heard it said so many times that I'm willing to consider the possibility while waiting for an explanation to my question.

My question is: if this is true, why the heck is the pronunciation for standard Mandarin so different from the standard Beijing and northern accents? Seriously, especially with all the "er"s at the end of various characters. It does not sound similar to what is taught in standard Mandarin classes, and I speak as one who learned standard Mandarin for a number of years (in Canada and in China) and also lived in Beijing for a bit. I'd really like this explained to me, because the ear test tells me this is not true. But again, I've heard it said so many times that I am willing to consider it's possible.

[barry-cotter]

Mandarin is based on the Northern topolect 北方话 but not identical with it. It’s a koiné[1] a dialect that emerged from communication between people who spoke mutually intelligible dialects, like Shamghainese for its river delta. That’s one reason it’s different. The other is the substantial influence from Nanjing Mandarin which would have been considered higher prestige than Beijing Mandarin into the 1800s. Beijing is the biggest influence but Mandarin is really the lingua franca of educated Inperial officials, many of whom would have come from areas where Mandarin doesn’t have retroflex r and of people for whom any variety of Mandarin was a foreign language, learned in adulthood. Lots of these people would just think the 儿话 is for peasants.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koiné_language

[PakG1]

This is quite interesting. I'd like to do more research to confirm the veracity, but it would make sense, thanks.

[spacehunt]

I think you should form your opinion after hearing what Cantonese (and other regional "dialects") sound like. Then you should be able to appreciate just how close the Northern speech is to Standard Chinese.

[PakG1]

I'm not sure why you think I don't know what other dialects sound like. I know what various languages and dialects in China sound like, and am most familiar with Cantonese, Sichuanese, Hunanese, Hakka, Shanghainese, and Yi. Yi sounds positively African and is not a fair comparison, given that it doesn't even share the same writing system and is probably an actually completely different language family. Sichuanese sounds fairly close to standard Mandarin in many respects, and I'm not confident that it's more different from standard Mandarin pronunciation than the northern speech is. My opinion stands after extensive travel throughout northern, southern, eastern, and western China.

[barry-cotter]

Is this the Yi you speak of?

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

It appears to be a Tai Chinese creole or mixed language (like a creole but without the massive simplification in grammar).

Yi(Loloish) is definitely a different language family though that wouldn’t stop people writing in Mandarin if they really wanted to. Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese were all written as if they were Classical Chinese to greater or lesser extents until relatively recently.

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

I’ve heard Sichuanese described as Mandarin without tones. All of Sìchuān speaks different forms of Mandarin for the same reason Manchurians do, recent massive resettlement, though not as recent as in 东北.

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

[PakG1]

No, it's the language of the Nuosu people to which I'm referring. Yeah, them being a different language family wouldn't stop them from writing in Mandarin. I know that, having learned Japanese and Korean. My point is that if the original written language is different between two languages, it is a strong indicator that they come from different language families. This does not stop them from starting to use the same writing system at some point in history, especially if one of the languages has no original written form.

If Sichuanese sounds similar to Mandarin due to migration, it would certainly explain a lot. Thanks for that bit of information. But I would say that the differences between Sichuanese and standard Mandarin would be more from pronunciation differences than tonal differences.

[barry-cotter]

It looks like Nuosu and Loloish are different ways of referring to the same language (group) with Lolo being the Chinese name and Nuosu being their name for themselves.

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

> Nuosu is one of several often mutually unintelligible varieties known as Yi, Lolo, Moso, or Noso; the six Yi languages recognized by the Chinese government hold only 25% to 50% of their vocabulary in common. They share a common traditional writing system, though this is used for shamanism rather than daily accounting.

I bow to your superior expertise when it comes to the differences between Sichuanese and Mandarin but all of Sìchuān is definitely part of the Mandarin speaking area.

The book to buy if you’re interested in this is the Language Atlas of China.

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

[spacehunt]

As a native Hong Konger, I concur this is the most succinct and accurate description of the situation with Cantonese. Thank you!