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Concept
Beijing dialect
Summary
The Beijing dialect (), also known as Pekingese and Beijingese, is the prestige dialect of Mandarin spoken in the urban area of Beijing, China. It is the phonological basis of Standard Chinese, the official language in the People's Republic of China and one of the official languages of Singapore and the Republic of China (Taiwan). Despite the similarity to Standard Chinese, it is characterized by some "iconic" differences, including the addition of a final rhotic -r / 儿 to some words (e.g. 哪儿). During the Ming, southern dialectal influences were also introduced into the dialect.
History of Modern Standard Chinese
As the political and cultural capital of China, Beijing has held much historical significance as a city, and its speech has held sway as a lingua franca. Being officially selected to form the basis of the phonology of Standard Mandarin has further contributed to its status as a prestige dialect, or sometimes the prestige dialect of Chinese.
Other scholars have referred to it as the "elite Beijing accent."
Until at least the late eighteenth century, the standard language of the Chinese elite had been the Nanjing dialect, despite political power having already been located in Beijing. Through the nineteenth century, evidence from Western dictionaries suggests that a shift occurred in the court from a Nanjing-based standard to a more local Beijing-based one.
During the Qing dynasty it was used alongside the Manchu language as the official court language.
The establishment of phonology of Standard Chinese dates from a 1913 decision by the Commission on the Unification of Pronunciation, which took the Beijing dialect as its base but retained a lot of phonology from other varieties of Mandarin, resulting in the Old National Pronunciation. This was overturned in 1926, resulting in the "pronunciation of the educated natives of Beijing" officially adopted as the basis for the phonology of Standard Chinese (Guoyu) in 1926.
Official source
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