Beijing dialect


The Beijing dialect, also known as Pekingese, 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 Republic of China and one of the official languages in Singapore. 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. Between the Yuan and Qing, the Ming dynasty also introduced southern dialectal influences into the dialect.

History

Status as prestige dialect

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 in 1926.
In 1955, the People's Republic of China declared that Standard Chinese was to be "modeled on the pronunciation of Beijing, draws on Northern Chinese as its base dialect, and receives its syntactic norms from exemplary works of vernacular literature".
The Beijing dialect has been described as carrying a lot of "cultural heft." According to Zhang Shifang, professor at Beijing Language and Culture University,
"As China's ancient and modern capital, Beijing and thus its linguistic culture as well are representative of our entire nation's civilization... For Beijing people themselves, the Beijing dialect is an important symbol of identity."

Some argue that Shanghainese also retains a level of local prestige, and others argue that Cantonese is the "only dialect which has attained a level of prestige that rivals that of the standard national language."
The dialect has been described as "the official language of the entertainment industry", making it also the "showbiz accent."
Even within Beijing the dialect varies. Those north of the Forbidden City spoke with a more "refined" accent than the poorer people, craftsmen, and performers of the south.

Younger generation

Some fear that the vernacular Beijing dialect will disappear. According to a 2010 study by Beijing Union University, 49% of young Beijingers born after 1980 prefer to speak standard Mandarin rather than the Beijing dialect. According to a UN report, nearly 100 Chinese dialects, especially those spoken by the 55 ethnic minorities in China, are endangered. Despite this, very small amounts of the vernacular Beijing dialect, like the rhotic -r and various vocabulary words, have been continuously passed down and even those of the younger generation are easily identifiable as Beijingers from this.

Mutual intelligibility

The Beijing dialect is generally mutually intelligible with other Mandarin dialects, including Putonghua. However it is not intelligible with other Sino-Tibetan languages or even other Chinese languages including Cantonese, Hokkien, and Wu Chinese.
Dungan language is a Mandarin derived Sinitic language spoken throughout Central Asia, particularly in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Speakers like Dungan poet and scholar Iasyr Shivaza and others have reported that Chinese who speak Beijing dialect could understand Dungan, but Dungans could not understand Beijing Mandarin.

Phonology

In fundamental structure, the phonology of the Beijing dialect and Standard Chinese are almost identical. In part, this is because the pronunciation of Standard Chinese was based on Beijing pronunciation. However, the Beijing dialect also has vernacular readings of characters which are not only different, but have initial and final combinations that are not present in Standard Chinese, such as diǎ 嗲, sēi 塞, béng 甭, tēi 忒' and shǎi 色.
However, some striking differences exist. Most prominent is the proliferation of rhotic vowels. All rhotic vowels are the result of the use of the -儿, a noun suffix, except for a few words pronounced that do not have this suffix. In Standard Chinese, these also occur but much less often than they appear in Beijing dialect. This phenomenon is known as érhuà or rhotacization, as is considered one of the iconic characteristics of Beijing Mandarin.
When /w/ occurs in syllable-initial position, many speakers use before vowels other than as in 我 wǒ, and as in 五 wu, e.g. 尾巴 wěiba.
When /ŋ/ occurs before a glide or vowel it is often eliminated along with any following glides so 中央 zhōngyāng is pronounced zhuāng and 公安局 gōng'ānjú as guāngjú.
Sibilant initials differ a lot between Standard Chinese and the Beijing dialect. The initials /ts tsʰ s/ are pronounced as in Beijing. are pronounced as by some female speakers, a feature known as 女国音 nǚguóyīn, or "female Standard Chinese pronunciation".
Moreover, Beijing dialect has a few phonetic reductions that are usually considered too "colloquial" for use in Standard Chinese. These are often dependent on which syllables are stressed and unstressed. For example, in fast speech, initial consonants go through lenition if they are in an unstressed syllable: pinyin before become , so 不知道 bùzhīdào "don't know" can sound like bùrdào; laoshi 老师 can sound like laoer; resulting in a "swallowing of consonants", or tūnyīn 吞音.
become , so 赶紧去 gǎnjǐnqù "go quickly" can sound like gǎnyǐnqù; pinyin go through voicing to become ; intervocalic also lose aspiration and can be voiced, sounding identical to ; similar changes also occur on other consonants.
is voiced and relaxed in intervocalic positions, resulting in .
Affricates are elided into fricatives when not word initial, such as máocè 茅厕 becoming máosi.
Some of these changes yield syllables that violate the syllable structure of Standard Chinese, such as 大柵欄 Dà Zhàlán Street, which locals pronounce as Dàshlàr.
The literary tones of Beijing dialect tend to be more exaggerated than Standard Chinese. In Standard Chinese, the four tones are high flat, high rising, low dipping, and falling; in Beijing dialect, the first two tones are higher, the third one dips more prominently, and the fourth one falls more. However, toneless syllables are incredibly common in vernacular Beijing dialect and the third tone is realized as a low tone instead of a dipping tone, known as a "half third tone".

Influence on Manchu

The Chinese Northern Mandarin dialect spoken in Beijing had a major impact on the phonology of the dialect of Manchu spoken in Beijing, and since Manchu phonology was transcribed into Chinese and European sources based on the sinified pronunciation of Manchus from Beijing, the original authentic Manchu pronunciation is unknown to scholars.
The Manchus that lived in Beijing were influenced by Beijing dialect insofar as pronouncing Manchu sounds was hard for them, and they pronounced Manchu according to Chinese phonetics. In contrast, the Manchus of Aigun, Heilongjiang could both pronounce Manchu sounds properly and mimic the sinified pronunciation of Manchus in Beijing. This was because they learned the Beijing pronunciation from either studying in Peking or from officials sent to Aigun from Beijing. They could also tell them apart, using the Chinese influenced pronunciation of Beijing to demonstrate that they were better educated and had "superior stature" in society.

Influence on Mongolian

A substantial proportion of the loanwords in Mongolian are derived from Chinese, with the oldest layer of loanwords in Written Mongolian being Chinese in origin. Much of Mongolian spoken in Inner Mongolia has been affected by Mandarin: lexical influence is claimed to be strong in Khorchin Mongolian, whilst there have been claims of phonetic influence from Mandarin Chinese in the Kharchin variety of Mongolian. The aspirated bilabial stop /pʰ/ and the labial approximant /w/ are phonemes only found in loanwords from Chinese and Tibetan, evident in their limited distribution in Mongolian. Substantial diglossia can also be observed in Inner Mongolia.

Vocabulary

Beijing dialect typically uses many words that are considered slang, and therefore occur much less or not at all in Standard Chinese. Speakers not native to Beijing may have trouble understanding many or most of these. Many of such slang words employ the rhotic suffix "-r", which is known as erhua. Examples include:
Some Beijing phrases may be somewhat disseminated outside Beijing:
Note that some of the slang are considered to be tuhua , or "base" or "uneducated" language, that are carryovers from an older generation and are no longer used amongst more educated speakers, for example:
Others may be viewed as neologistic expressions used among younger speakers and in "trendier" circles:
The dialect also contains both Manchu and Mongol loanwords:
There are syntactic differences between Standard Mandarin and Beijing dialect. Both southern Chinese and southern Mandarin syntactic features were incorporated into Standard Mandarin, while the Beijing dialect retains features of northern Mandarin. The Beijing dialect also uses colloquial expressions differently.
There is a conditional loss of the classifier under certain circumstances after the numeral 一 "one", usually pronounced yí in the second tone, as if undergoing tone sandhi with the classifier 个 gè after it.
In general, Standard Chinese is influenced by Classical Chinese, which makes it more condense and concise. Beijing dialect can therefore seem more longwinded; but this is sometime balanced by the generally faster speaking rate and phonetic reductions of colloquial Beijing speech.

Examples