ABSTRACT

The term Standard Chinese commonly refers to a number of different but related linguistic forms. One of them is Putonghua ‘the common language’, the official Standard Spoken Chinese being promoted by the government of the People’s Republic of China since the 1950s. Another one is the written form accepted by the majority of Chinese people and being taught in schools in all Chinese-speaking communities. There are also a number of related terms. They include Guoyu ‘national language’, which refers to the Standard Spoken Chinese in Taiwan nowadays and in the mainland before 1949; Huayu ‘language of the Chinese people’, which is used in Singapore for Standard Chinese; Mandarin ‘language of the general’, which refers to the dialect of Beijing; as well as Guanhua ‘the language of the officials’, which is typically the dialect of the capital of various empires. Another term is Classical Chinese, which refers to the dominant written form for formal genres before the early twentieth century.