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Mandarin (Traditional Chinese: 官話; Simplified Chinese: 官话, pinyin: Guānhuà; literally "speech of officials"), or Beifanghua (Simplified Chinese: 北方话; Traditional Chinese: 北方話; pinyin: Běifānghuà; literally "Northern Dialect(s)"), is a category of related Chinese dialects spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. When taken as a separate language, as is often done in academic literature, the Mandarin dialects have more speakers than any other language.

In English, Mandarin can refer to two distinct concepts:

to Standard Chinese or Standard Mandarin (Putonghua/Guoyu/Huayu), which is based on the particular Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing. Standard Mandarin functions as the official spoken language of the People's Republic of China, the official language of the Republic of China (Taiwan), and one of the four official languages of Singapore. "Chinese" — in practice Standard Mandarin — is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. This standardized version of Mandarin is dealt with in the article Standard Mandarin.
to all of the Mandarin dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China. This group of dialects is the focus of this article.
In everyday use, "Mandarin" refers usually to just Standard Mandarin (Putonghua/Guoyu). In its broader sense, Mandarin is a diverse group of related dialects, some less mutually intelligible than others. It is a grouping defined and used mainly by linguists, and is not commonly used outside of academic circles as a self-description. Instead, when asked to describe the spoken form they are using, Chinese speaking a form of non-Standard Mandarin will describe the variant that they are speaking, for example Sichuan dialect or Northeast China dialect, and consider it distinct from "Standard Mandarin" (putonghua); they may not recognize that it is in fact classified by linguists as a form of "Mandarin" in a broader sense. Nor is there a common "Mandarin" identity based on language; rather, there are strong regional identities centered on individual dialects, because of the wide geographical distribution and cultural diversity of its speakers.

Like all other varieties of Chinese, there is significant dispute as to whether Mandarin is a language or a dialect. See Identification of the varieties of Chinese for more on this issue.

The present divisions of the Chinese language developed out of the different ways in which dialects of Old Chinese and Middle Chinese evolved.

Most Chinese living in northern and southwestern China are native speakers of a dialect of Mandarin. The prevalence of this linguistic homogeneity in northern China is largely the result of geography: much of northern China is covered by plains and is flat. In contrast to this, the mountains and rivers of southern China have promoted linguistic diversity. The presence of Mandarin in southwest China is largely due to a plague in the 12th century in Sichuan. This plague, which may have been related to the black death, depopulated the area, leading to later settlement from northern China.

There is no clear line to mark where Middle Chinese ends and Mandarin begins; however, the Zhōngyuán Yīnyùn (中原音韵), a rhyme book from the Yuan Dynasty, is widely regarded as a milestone in the history of Mandarin. In this rhyme book we see many characteristic features of Mandarin, such as the reduction and disappearance of final stop consonants and the reorganization of the Middle Chinese tones.

Until the mid-20th century, most Chinese people living in southern China spoke only their local language. Beijing Mandarin became dominant during the officially Manchu-speaking Qing Empire, and from the 17th century onward, the Empire set up Orthoepy Academies (Simplified Chinese: 正音书院; Traditional Chinese: 正音書院; pinyin: Zhèngyīn Shūyuàn) in an attempt to make local pronunciations conform to the Beijing standard. These attempts, however, had little success.

This situation changed with the widespread introduction of Standard Mandarin as the national language, to be used in education, the media, and formal situations in both the PRC and the ROC (but not in Hong Kong). As a result, Standard Mandarin can now be spoken intelligibly as second language by most younger people in Mainland China and Taiwan, with various regional accents. In Hong Kong and Macau, because of their colonial and linguistic history, the language of education, the media, formal speech and everyday life remains the local Cantonese, although Standard Mandarin is becoming increasingly influential.

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