Mandarin (late imperial lingua franca)

Mandarin
Middle Mandarin
官話 Guānhuà
Frontispiece of Fourmont's Chinese grammar (1742): Chũm Kuĕ Kuõn Hoá (中國官話), or Medii Regni Communis Loquela ('Middle Kingdom's Common Speech')[1]
Region	China
Era	Ming and Qing dynasties
Language family	Sino-Tibetan Sinitic Chinese Mandarin Chinese Mandarin
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	None

Mandarin (traditional Chinese: 官話; simplified Chinese: 官话; pinyin: Guānhuà; lit. 'official speech') was the common spoken language of administration of the Chinese empire during the Ming and Qing dynasties. It arose as a practical measure, due to the mutual unintelligibility of the varieties of Chinese spoken in different parts of China. Knowledge of this language was thus essential for an official career, but it was never formally defined.^[2][3] The language was a koiné based on Mandarin dialects. The southern variant spoken around Nanjing was prevalent in the late Ming and early Qing eras, but a form based on the Beijing dialect became dominant by the mid-19th century and developed into Standard Chinese in the 20th century.^[4] In some 19th-century works, it was called the court dialect.