Mandarin (linguistics)

:This article is on all of the Northern Chinese dialects. For the standardized official spoken Chinese language (Putonghua/Guoyu), see Standard Mandarin.

Vocabulary

There are many more words in Mandarin with more than one syllable than in other varieties of Chinese. This is because Mandarin has undergone many more sound changes than have southern varieties of Chinese, and has needed to deal with many more homophones — usually by forming new words via compounding. This creates words with more than one syllable. (By contrast, Ancient Chinese had almost no words of more than one syllable.)

Related Topics:
Homophone - Ancient Chinese

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The pronouns in Mandarin are wǒ (我) "I", nǐ (你) "you", and tā (他/她) "he/she", with -men (们) added for the plural. Dialects of Mandarin agree with each other quite consistently on this, but not with other varieties of Chinese (e.g. Wu has 侬 "you").

Related Topics:
Pronoun - Wu

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In addition, there is zánmen (咱们), a "we" that includes the listener, and nín (您), a deferential way of saying "you". A comparable example would be Sie and du in German.

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Other morphemes that Mandarin dialects tend to share are aspect and mood particles, such as -le (了), -zhe (着), and -guo (过). Other Chinese varieties tend to use different words in some of these contexts (e.g. Cantonese 咗 and 紧).

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Due to contact with Central Asian cultures, Mandarin has some loanwords from Altaic languages not present in other varieties of Chinese, for example hútong (胡同) "alley". Southern Chinese borrows more from Tai or Austronesian languages.

Related Topics:
Central Asia - Altaic language - Southern Chinese - Tai - Austronesian

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