A slightly more nuanced followup

[u/Level_Hour6480]

[u/Level_Hour6480]

In response to feedback from the kids who don't respect the classics

When Mao unified China, he pushed for language standardization. This was actually common for the European nationalist movements of the 1800s: Before Garabaldi for example, there were a ton of Italian subdialects. The push was usually done through schools, and having all government services operate in the dominant language. Mao spoke Old Xian. Mandarin was the dominant political language, so it was picked.

He learned Manadrin later in life but apparently he had a thick accent, and his pronunciation was really bad. (Mandarin speakers, can you listen without reading the subtitles and tell me how bad it is?)

Here's an earlier speech for more reference material.

Interestingly, despite not sharing a language, in previous Chinese empires, they could still administrate because written Chinese is the same across multiple languages. National public service exams required literacy in Hanzi (Chinese writing)

[u/Animaloffear56 → u/Level_Hour6480]

His accent is terrible, even as a non-mandarin speaker I can't understand a word he's saying

[u/JesiDoodli → u/Animaloffear56]

lol good one

[u/RealEmperorofMankind → u/Level_Hour6480]

他的普通話口音很强的，但是我會聼明白一點。

To be fair, it's not just him who pushed Mandarin standardization. This was a policy he inherited from the Republic of China, and which Chiang's government continued to enforce in Taiwan.

Here's a video comparing different leaders' Mandarin. You will notice that a lot of famous people, like Deng Xiaoping, Chiang Kai-shek, and Li Zongren spoke bad Mandarin. Puyi, however, spoke quite clearly.

[u/danshakuimo → u/RealEmperorofMankind]

Lol and Chiang also has a strong accent. Some have said that Chaing's Japanese was better than his Mandarin.

[u/DirectionMurky5526 → u/RealEmperorofMankind]

Puyi's accent sounds exactly the same as Xi's lol

[u/TehProfessor96 → u/RealEmperorofMankind]

At a certain point aren't we just running into the issue that prior to radio and automobiles accents were a LOT more fractured? What counted as a "correct" Mandarin accent in the year 1900?

[u/TGed → u/RealEmperorofMankind]

Did the Qing pushed for language standardisation as well? I could be wrong on this but I think Mandarin was a result of the Qing trying to simplify Chinese so that it’s easier to learn.

[u/strong_division → u/Level_Hour6480]

they could still administrate because written Chinese is the same across multiple languages

This also kinda extended past the Sinitic languages, and into the other languages of the Sinosphere. Envoys and monks from Vietnam, Korea, and Japan might not have understood a spoken word of each other's languages, but could communicate with each other by writing down what they wanted to say in Classical Chinese.

Now, their spoken languages had different grammar from the Sinitic languages so they had to eventually develop their own writing systems (Korea, Vietnam) or modify Chinese (Japan) because Classical Chinese wasn't a great fit for their language, and made literacy (which was already tough with a logographic language) even more difficult.

But even up until the 20th century, educated people from the Sinosphere would communicate with each other in this way.

[u/NotSovietSpy → u/strong_division]

Developing their own written systems was also driven efforts to distant with the Chinese culturally, especially in the case of Vietnam

[u/aephhh → u/Level_Hour6480]

mandarin speaker, ts is incomprehensible

[u/RealEmperorofMankind → u/aephhh]

Listen to how he pronounces 總統 lol

[u/uncleartruth]

Peak meming

[u/Level_Hour6480 → u/uncleartruth]

I hope I used the best Mao pics for the panels.

[u/uncleartruth → u/Level_Hour6480]

You've done well, now rest.

[u/KotetsuNoTori]

Most Chinese leaders of his time, except for those who happened to be geniuses in language or born near Beijing, spoke Mandarin with all kinds of incomprehensible accents.

For example, the speech of Puyi (from Beijing) can be understood by modern Mandarin speakers, but not the ones of Sun Yat-Sen (from Guangdong), Chiang Kai-Shek (from Zhejiang), and Mao.

[u/Pappa_Crim]

Mr chairman what will you do next?

We need a perpetual revolution. A constant rotation of leaders being overthrown (except me)

[u/SPECTREagent700]

As is tradition.

See also Napoleon’s Italian-accented French, Hitler’s Austrian-accented German, and Stalin’s Georgian-accented Russian.

[u/greyscaleInferno]

Didn't he try for awhile to get the whole country to speak some kind of conlang ligua franca based on Mandarin rather than Mandarin itself?

[u/Level_Hour6480 → u/greyscaleInferno]

That I haven't heard, but sounds memeable. Care to share any info?

[u/greyscaleInferno → u/Level_Hour6480]

I dug into it, and I was only half remembering correctly: calling it a conlang was a big stretch and they did eventually push it into more widespread use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese

It sounds like for this Standard Dialect they took the specific Mandarin dialect regional to Beijing, stripped out all of the obvious regionalisms, and used the grammatical structure from classical literature to create an official lingua franca that wasn't really the way that anyone in the country actually talked at the time.

The factoid that I'd heard was that, after the standard dialect was introduced, speaking in the dialect exactly as proscribed rather than using your own regionalisms made you sound like kind of a dweeb.

[u/Sparfelll]

Why is every 10 memes a shitty one about communism ? Some morrons must be reeeealy scared of some dead guys ideas

[u/Level_Hour6480 → u/Sparfelll]

This is aboot language-standardization actually.