Tag: Language Classification

guānhuà (guān·huà {government official; mandarin} · speech → [(old name for) Mandarin | officalese; bureaucratese; bureaucratic jargon] 官话 官話) ← Tap/click to show/hide the “flashcard”

Why is Mandarin called “Mandarin” in English?

Nope, it wasn’t because of mandarin oranges.
 SirSadiq

Wikipedia provides this summary:

The English word “mandarin” (from Portuguese mandarim, from Malay menteri, from Sanskrit mantrī, mantrin, meaning ‘minister or counsellor’) originally meant an official of the Ming and Qing empires. Since their native varieties were often mutually unintelligible, these officials communicated using a Koiné language based on various northern varieties. When Jesuit missionaries learned this standard language in the 16th century, they called it “Mandarin”, from its Chinese name Guānhuà (官话/官話) or ‘language of the officials’.^[source]

So, according to the above summary, the English word “Mandarin” comes to us from Sanskrit, Malay, and Portuguese, and was chosen to correspond with this week’s MEotW, “guānhuà (guān·huà {government official; mandarin} · speech → [(old name for) Mandarin | officalese; bureaucratese; bureaucratic jargon] 官话 官話)”. These days, Chinese speakers in general don’t refer to Modern Standard Mandarin as “guānhuà (guān·huà {government official; mandarin} · speech → [(old name for) Mandarin | officalese; bureaucratese; bureaucratic jargon] 官话 官話)”^[source], but apparently Chinese linguists still use this term:

Linguists use the term “Mandarin” to refer to the diverse group of dialects spoken in northern and southwestern China, which Chinese linguists call Guānhuà.

(Note that the English word “dialect” is often misused and misunderstood when applied to the Chinese languages, causing many to wrongly believe that Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, etc. are merely dialects of a single Chinese language, when in fact, they are as different from each other as English is different from, say, Swedish or German. It really works better to consider Mandarin, Cantonese, etc. to be different languages, just as Swedish, German, etc. are considered to be different languages, and not just dialects of “European”. I hope to address this further in a future MEotW post.)

Because of its literal meaning of “government officials’ speech”, “guānhuà (guān·huà {government official; mandarin} · speech → [(old name for) Mandarin | officalese; bureaucratese; bureaucratic jargon] 官话 官話)” is sometimes also used to refer to what in English we call “officalese; bureaucratese; bureaucratic jargon”.