Why Mandarin is called Putonghua

Order a Chinese textbook from any publisher in the English-speaking world and the cover says Mandarin. The word is used for the spoken language, for the standard written form, and for the test a foreign student takes to prove proficiency in it. In Chinese, the same test is the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi, and the language it measures is pǔtōnghuà.

That name is two characters. Pǔtōng means common or universal. Huà means speech. “Common speech.” In English-language material issued by Chinese ministries, the same word usually appears untranslated, as Putonghua.

There is no everyday equivalent of Mandarin inside the language itself. A speaker in Beijing asked, in Chinese, what language they speak will answer 普通话, or 中文, or 汉语 — never Mandarin, which is not a Chinese word at all. The vocabulary splits along the two sides of the contact: one name for outsiders, one for the people who use it.

So a language spoken by more than a billion people reaches English under a name its own speakers rarely use. Neither name is wrong, and the useful question is not which one is correct. It is why there is a second name at all, when the Chinese-speaking world had settled on one decades earlier — and why the replacement was chosen on a specific day, by a specific body, rather than drifting into use.

The usual explanation, and where it breaks

The common answer is a single sentence: Mandarin is the official language of China. Two parts of that sentence do not survive a check.

China does not have a legal category called “official language.” As a People’s Daily explainer on the subject puts it, the country has never designated one, for the same reason it has no state religion: doing so would sit awkwardly with a system that treats the languages of all its ethnic groups as equal. What the law actually says is different. The National Common Language and Script Law, adopted on 31 October 2000 and in force since 1 January 2001, defines the “standard spoken and written national language” as Putonghua together with the standardised characters. The constitution, for its part, says only that the state promotes Putonghua, “which is in common use throughout the country.”

The second problem is the implication that the name simply descended through history. It did not. Putonghua is a word that was in circulation among scholars early in the twentieth century, but as the official name of the standard it dates from a decision taken in October 1955, replacing a term that had been in state use for about forty years.

The English name describes officials, not speakers

The word Mandarin did not come from Chinese. It came from Portuguese, and it names a job.

Portuguese traders and missionaries reached the Chinese coast in the sixteenth century and settled in Macau. The officials they negotiated with they called mandarim — borrowed from Malay menteri, which comes from Sanskrit mantrin, meaning minister or counsellor. The Portuguese were simultaneously colonising Malacca on the Malay peninsula, and Malay was the region’s trading language. English took the word from Portuguese and eventually applied it to the speech those officials used with each other.

The word has been retrofitted to Chinese at least once. Mandarin sounds close enough to mandaren, a phrase that can be read as “important Manchu person”, that the folk etymology took hold after the Qing dynasty, whose rulers came from Manchuria. It is not true: Portuguese writers were calling Ming officials mandarins a century before the Qing existed. The linguist David Moser, in his history of the language, notes that Mandarin has what he calls a distinctly non-Mandarin origin. The citrus fruit of the same name came along later, and may have been named for the yellow robes those officials wore.

There is an irony worth keeping in view. The Portuguese were translating an existing Chinese idea. For centuries the spoken standard used between officials from different provinces had been called 官话, guanhua — literally “the speech of officials.” Mandarin is a translation of that, not a description of the language itself.

What the language was called before 1955

The standard that mattered for most of the imperial period was a written one. Classical Chinese governed documents and examinations, and it was nobody’s spoken language. Alongside it, a spoken norm existed for people who had to be understood outside their own province, and it was that norm — not the written standard — that Europeans encountered and named.

The Republic changed what the standard was for. In February 1913 a Conference for the Unification of Reading Pronunciation met in Beijing and settled the pronunciation of some 6,500 characters. Because the delegates came disproportionately from the south, the conference adopted a rule of one vote per province, and the system it produced was later judged artificial. In 1924 the committee responsible abandoned that standard in favour of Beijing pronunciation, and in 1932 the Ministry of Education published the Guoyin Changyong Zihui, a character vocabulary that fixed the new reading standard. Through all of this the language’s official name was 国语, guoyu — “national language.”

The word that would replace it is older than most accounts allow, and it did not begin as a state term. In 1906 a scholar named Zhu Wenxiong, working on a phonetic alphabet, used 普通话 in a book titled Jiangsu Xin Zimu, and defined it plainly as “the speech in common use in every province.”

The meeting that chose the word

The name was fixed in October 1955, at the National Conference on Script Reform, convened in Beijing from 15 to 23 October by the Committee for Script Reform and the Ministry of Education.

The stated reason for dropping guoyu was not linguistic. Zhang Xiruo, delivering the conference’s main report, explained that the country was a multi-ethnic family, and that a term meaning “national language” risked being read as putting Chinese above the languages of other ethnic groups. The name adopted instead was the one Zhu Wenxiong had proposed forty-nine years earlier, understood to mean common and mutually intelligible.

The conference also had to decide what the standard would be built on, and on this point it did not simply follow the capital by default. Delegates voted among fifteen major regional speech groups. Beijing Mandarin took 52 votes. Southwestern Mandarin took 51 — a single vote behind — followed by Wu with 46 and Cantonese with 25. A week later, on 26 October, the People’s Daily carried an editorial promoting the new name and its definition, which is how the vocabulary reached the general public.

The document that defined it

The definition quoted in most references comes from an administrative directive, not a dictionary. On 6 February 1956 the State Council issued its Directive on Promoting Putonghua, describing the standard as “taking Beijing pronunciation as the standard, the northern dialects as the base, and the model modern vernacular writings as the grammatical norm.” The full text is in the State Council Gazette for that year.

It was a directive with a timetable attached. The same document ordered that from the autumn of 1956, language classes in primary and secondary schools outside ethnic-minority areas were to begin teaching Putonghua, and that by 1960 pupils above the third grade should speak it in the main. Radio stations were instructed to run courses with the local promotion committees. The armed forces were told to bring recruits to working use of it within a year of enlistment.

Adoption did not run to that schedule. A national review conference in June 1957 recorded that momentum had faded in schools and stalled in offices, and it produced the twelve-character policy that guided the work from then on: promote vigorously, press ahead in key areas, extend step by step. In January 1958 Zhou Enlai, addressing a meeting of the national committee of the political consultative conference, framed the aim narrowly — the point, he said, was to remove the barrier between dialects, not to prohibit or abolish them.

How it became a term of law

From there the name moved through the legal system at its own pace. It entered the constitution in 1982, in Article 19: the state promotes Putonghua as the language in common use nationwide. In October 2000 the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress passed the National Common Language and Script Law, which took effect on 1 January 2001 and gave the standard its current legal description. In forty-five years the word had travelled from a conference resolution to a defined term.

What this does not say

This piece is about how a name and a definition were fixed. It is not an assessment of the policy, and it takes no position on whether standardising a language is the right thing for a state to do.

Three limits are worth stating plainly. First, Putonghua is a standard, not a majority mother tongue. It is a norm that was specified and then taught, and “able to speak it” is not the same as “speaks it at home.” Published figures put the share of the population able to speak it at about 53 per cent in 2000 and roughly 73 per cent in 2015 — for a great many of those speakers it is a second way of speaking, used at school, at work, or with anyone from another province. Second, the vote in 1955 chose a base, not a whole: making the northern dialects the base of the standard is not the same as folding every other way of speaking into it. Regional speech remains, and in most of those regions it is still what people use with their families.

What it means if you are learning Chinese

The practical payoff is small and specific. You will keep meeting three names, and they belong to three different contexts.

Mandarin is the English exonym. It came through Portuguese, it originally meant a class of officials, and it is what the international textbook industry uses. Nothing about it is Chinese, and there is no reason to drop it in English.

Putonghua is the name China uses for itself, fixed in 1955 and defined in 1956. You will meet it in official translations, in the names of tests, and in ministry material published in English.

Chinese — Hanyu, or Zhongwen — is the larger category, and Putonghua is the standard inside it. Knowing that the standard is a twentieth-century construction does not change how the language works. It does explain a common experience: arriving with textbook Putonghua, finding the television easy and the dinner table hard.

The general pattern this belongs to — that ordinary things in China tend to have a documentable date rather than an immemorial one — is set out in Why so many Chinese habits look old. Further pieces on the standard language, its spelling system and its characters are collected under Language. The strand about decisions taken by committees and ministries is filed under the language policy tag, and the broader approach under habit origins.