Naia Pard’s Reviews > A Billion Voices: China's Search for a Common Language: Penguin Specials > Status Update

finished on 14.05.2022

“The rather imprecise term ‘Mandarin Chinese’ is now used to refer to a range of mutually intelligible varieties of Chinese that have been accepted as the standard official language throughout all the countries and regions of the Chinese diaspora.”

"Just as generational differences in regional accents throughout the world have been diluted or erased due to the influence of broadcast media, in China as well, regional forms of speech are losing out to the common language. ”

“With the exception of certain ethnic minority areas,

starting from 1956, most primary and middle schools throughout China began a push to either make Putonghua the language of classroom instruction, or to teach it as a second language.”

“[...] the Internet has given rise to a new kind of Chinese dialect: Internet slang.

As Internet censorship increased in the 2000s, netizens began to take subversive delight in creating puns, coinages and wordplay that would confound the censorship apparatus.”

“ ‘We spent three years developing pinyin. People made fun of us, joking that it had taken us a long time to deal with just 26 letters,’ he later said."

“to many people the imposition of a national language seemed to entail that a huge proportion of the Chinese people would actually have to be taught how to ‘speak Chinese’. ”

“These were truly revolutionary times.”

Finally! I have found where does the "mandarin" term comes from:

“However, when the Jesuits first came to China in the sixteenth century, guanhua was the first variety of Chinese they encountered, and they called it Mandarin, from the Portuguese mandarim , meaning ‘minister’ or ‘official’. ”