Chinese and Mandarin

Chinese and Mandarin

The word “Chinese” means belonging to or relating to China, its people, or its language. The word "Mandarin" originally denoted the officials of the Qing Empire, or their language. The Qing Empire, or the Manchu dynasty, was the last imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1644 to 1912. Manchu is an ethnic minority in China.

Mandarin is a spoken language developed from a mixture of Han and Manchu languages hundreds years ago. The Han is the largest ethnic group in China that constitutes more than ninety percent of the population of China. In linguistics, Mandarin is a Creole language that is a hybrid language formed from the contact of two spoken languages. In china, Mandarin is named as Putonghua that is the language most Chinese speak.

Mandarin was written in both Manchu scripts and Chinese characters one hundred years ago, and now it is in Chinese characters only. Manchu scripts have been abandoned.

Mandarin was digraphia that use of two scripts for the same spoken language. There are many examples of digraphia in the world. Turkish, for example, that replaced a Perso-Arabic writing system with a Latin-based system in 1928. Another example is Hindustani, or Hindi-Urdu, which uses two different writing systems, Devanagari and Perso-Arabic. And there are other examples, such as Serbian, Punjabi, Konkani, etc.

Strictly speaking, all non-Latin writing systems are digraphia. The reason is that romanization by ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, is the conversion of writing from different writing systems to the Latin scripts. Pinyin, Chinese alphabet, is the official romanization system for written Chinese.

In conclusion, do not confuse Chinese and Mandarin. If you refer Chinese as the spoken language, there are many spoken languages Chinese people speak, such as Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hakka, and etc. If you refer Chinese as the written language, it means Baihuawen, an official written language of Chinese.

中文和普通话

英文单词Chinese的意思是关于中国的，如中国人，中国的语言和文字。英文单词Mandarin原来的意思是指大清帝国的官员，或者他们使用的语言和文字。大清帝国这个满族人的王朝是中国最后一个王朝， 从1644年到1912年统治中国。满族是中国的少数民族。

Mandarin是几百年前由汉语和满语混合而发展形成的一种口语。汉族是中国最大的民族，人口占中国人口的百分之九十以上。在语言学中，Mandarin是两种口语混合而成的口语，也叫克里奥尔语。在中国Mandarin叫普通话，是大多数中国人说的口语。

一百年多前Mandarin用满文和汉字两种文字书写。现在满文已经被放弃，只使用汉字。

Mandarin曾经是一语双文，也就是一种口语使用两种不同的文字。世界上一语双文的例子不少。例如土耳其语，1928年用拉丁字母代替了阿拉伯字母。另外一个例子是Hindustani一种通用于印度和巴基斯坦的语言，它同时使用两种不同的书写系统，梵文字母和阿拉伯字母。还有其他例子，如塞尔维亚语，旁遮普语，康卡尼语等。

严格地说，所有的非拉丁字母的书写系统都可以一语双文。原因是ISO（国际标准化组织）的罗马化，把不同字母的书写系统都能换成拉丁字母的书写系统。拼音，中文使用的字母，是中文罗马化的国际标准。

总之，不要把普通话和白话文混为一谈。如果你把Chinese理解为口语，那么中国有许多种口语，如普通话，广东话，上海话，客家话等。如果你把Chinese定义为文字，那就是白话文，中国的通用文字。