Mandarin

Mandarin is native to the North China Plain, its dialects stretching from Yunnan to Heilongjiang. Most have four lexical tones, having lost the final stops of Middle Chinese while often keeping retroflex initials.

The northern speech of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan, known as Old Mandarin, bore a flourishing vernacular literature of qu songs and drama from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. The rime dictionaries Menggu Ziyun of 1308 and Zhongyuan Yinyun of 1324 record its sound system.

Because the imperial capitals lay in the Mandarin area, a northern koine served officials and the court from at least the fourteenth century; under the Ming and Qing it was called Guanhua, the language of the officials, which the Jesuit missionaries who learned it in the sixteenth century rendered as Mandarin.