ABSTRACT
The Mandarin dialects are mainly spoken in the valleys of the Yellow and Huai Rivers, Inner Mongolia, the Northeast, Shaanxi, Gansu, Xinjiang, Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou, and along the Yangtze River, by a population of over one billion. As an offi cial language, Mandarin proper (or Putonghua Პ䙊䂡 the common language) is in fact spoken throughout all of China. Mandarin dialects are divided into the regions of Northern Mandarin, Southwestern Mandarin, and Jiang-Huai (⊏␞) Mandarin. Although based on the accent of the educated in Beijing, which is a part of Northern Mandarin, Putonghua is not completely identical to the colloquial spoken in Beijing. For instance, 㮴 po A2, 1 ᆨ ɕyɛ A2, 㢢 sɤ C1, ᴤ kəŋ A1 in Putonghua are pau A2, ɕiau A2, ʂai C1, tɕiŋ A1 in the colloquial of Beijing. The Beijing dialect (like many Chinese dialects, including the other Northern dialects listed above) has a distinction between literary and fi gurative/colloquial strata, and its literary reading is what is taken for Putonghua.
