This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
Beijing speech belongs to the Jingshi cluster (also called the Jing-Cheng sub-cluster of the You-Yan cluster) of Beijing Mandarin within the Mandarin dialects of Chinese, and is spoken in the urban districts of Beijing. What is usually called Beijing speech refers to the accent of urban Beijing and does not include the dialects of Beijing’s suburban counties. Speakers have a marked rhotic “-er” ending (erhua), and some call the heavy accent of Beijing speech jingpianzi or jingqiang (“Beijing tones”). “Beijing speech” must be distinguished from “Beijing Mandarin”: the latter is a subdivision of the Mandarin dialects that includes Beijing speech. The great majority of dialects within the present-day jurisdiction of Beijing belong to Beijing Mandarin; only a few suburban districts and counties (Pinggu speech in Pinggu, and Yanqing speech in Yanqing, transitional between Beijing Mandarin and Jin) and some townships have distinctive dialects.
“Strictly speaking, the present national language is in some tenths Manchu in its sounds and rhymes; many character sounds are not native to the Han people.” This is the judgment of the master of national learning Zhang Taiyan, meaning that the Beijing dialect comes from Manchu and is not pure Chinese. This view was very influential in the late Qing and early Republic, and its influence remains strong even today.
It is true that the Beijing dialect contains many loanwords from Manchu, such as lata (sloppy), maornì (shady dealings), tong louzi (to cause trouble), zuojian (to ruin, degrade), mali (nimble), halazi (drool), guniang (girl), and so on. In addition, Chinese has always had only women for the first person plural, while zanmen (inclusive “we”) comes from Manchu; and Chinese has never had honorifics in the second and third person — 您 (nín) and 怹 (pronounced tān) also come from Manchu.
According to the records of Matteo Ricci, the Western missionary who came to China in the late Ming, Beijing at that time had no zh, ch, sh sounds, which also seems to be “proof” that Beijing speech is not pure. Then there is the erhua sound, found in Qingzhou, Dezhou, Xi’an, Chongqing, Chengdu and other places where the Eight Banners were garrisoned, suspected of coming from Manchu. Moreover, the intonation and phonology of Beijing speech are completely different from those of its suburbs but similar to those of Heilongjiang, clearly influenced by Manchu.
But these claims do not hold.
Aisin-Gioro Yingsheng clearly pointed out that Manchu has no erhua, and that the places in China that use erhua far outnumber the Eight Banner garrisons. Moreover, although Xi’an, Qingzhou and other places have erhua, their dialects are far from Beijing speech — how could only erhua have been passed on and nothing else? In fact, late-Ming documents already contain fairly complete records of erhua, which shows that it is a product of the internal development of Central Plains speech.
The origins of Beijing speech
So where, after all, did Beijing speech come from?
Beijing speech has two sources. One is Nanjing Mandarin, the main language of Beijing in the late Yuan and the Ming; the other is Shengjing (i.e. Shenyang) Mandarin, the main language of the Han Eight Banners. Together with Han servants and others, Han people made up 42.6% of the population stationed in Beijing’s Inner City in the early Qing. Hence Mr. Yingsheng says: “In the early Qing, the Han Bannermen brought the speech of Liaodong to Beijing, forming the Beijing speech of the Qing.”
In the early Qing, because many Han officials were employed, officialdom still mainly used Nanjing Mandarin. As it merged with Shengjing Mandarin, Beijing Mandarin was finally formed. According to the observations of Western diplomats, by around 1850 at the latest Beijing Mandarin had overtaken Nanjing Mandarin and become the common language of officialdom. But the Beijing speech of Beijing people of different classes at that time differed considerably: officials and literati leaned toward Nanjing Mandarin, peddlers and porters toward Shengjing Mandarin.
In 1903 the Qing government issued the School Regulations, stipulating: “The official pronunciation shall unify the language of the realm; therefore from normal schools to higher primary schools, a course in Mandarin shall be attached to the national literature subject.” This was the beginning of Beijing speech being set as the standard of the common language.
Beijing speech is high-pitched, and some of its sounds are hard for southerners to distinguish, which has led some people to resist it; but linking the language to the political environment of the time, and even stretching things to call it a foreign language, is not objective enough.
In fact, Yuan-dynasty zaju drama already shows many traces of later Beijing speech, but at that time Beijing used a northern dialect. The rulers of the mid-to-late Yuan once tried to make it the official speech but did not succeed, and had to replace it with Nanjing Mandarin. This at least proves that Beijing speech grew out of the northern dialect and later absorbed the best of Nanjing Mandarin, Manchu, Mongolian and others; hence it is lively and highly expressive — and this is exactly why so many outstanding writers have emerged from Beijing.
