What language was spoken in the Qing Dynasty?

According to different regions, the main languages in each region are Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan. The royal family and upper class are mainly Manchu and Mongolian, with a small amount of Chinese; There are more Manchu and Chinese among the people.

Manchu was nominally the national language in the early Qing dynasty, and then Mandarin became the national language. Due to the relationship between the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty, which made Beijing its capital, the tone of Nanjing Mandarin was gradually infected with the tone of Beijing dialect and northern dialect, and over time, "Northern Mandarin" was generated, which was mainly used by the people in Beijing and surrounding areas and had a low status. Therefore, the tone of "Nanjing Mandarin" was still used as the standard pronunciation in the early Qing Dynasty.

Since the Qing Dynasty, Beijing Mandarin has been gradually divided, and as the standard pronunciation of Chinese, it has been gradually divided into Nanjing Mandarin and Beijing Mandarin. In the early Qing Dynasty, Nanjing Mandarin was still the mainstream standard language of Chinese. In the eighth year of Yongzheng, the Zhengyin Pavilion was set up to promote Beijing Mandarin with Beijing accent as the standard. On the basis of the integration of the old Beiping dialect and Nanjing Mandarin in the Yuan Dynasty (when the Ming capital moved northward, more than half of Nanjing immigrants in Beijing), Beijing dialect was formed by adding a few transliterated Manchu words.

By the middle and late Qing Dynasty, Beijing Mandarin gradually replaced Nanjing Mandarin to gain the status of national language. In 199, the "National Language Editorial Committee" was formally established in Qing Dynasty, which was the national language in the late Qing Dynasty.

Extended information:

In addition to realizing the "Chinese-Yi family" in language, we can see the hardships and efforts made by the Qing Dynasty to realize the unity of political identity and cultural identity through "A Lost Sense of Justice" and "Imperial edict of abdication of the Qing Dynasty".

This process not only enabled the Qing people to complete the identity transformation from "Yi" to "Xia", but also further evolved the "Chinese sense of justice" with "Hua Yi family" as the core into the * * * same basis for non-Han world such as Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet and southwest nationalities to identify with the value of "Greater China", in order to realize "China" in the sense of culture and territory.

China was not dismembered under the impact of the modern western concept of "nation-state", but it triggered an integrated response of the "Chinese nation" and other facts, which not only highlighted the internal cohesion of the Qing Dynasty, but also highlighted the historical role played by the Imperial edict on the abdication of the Qing Emperor. These two historical documents, which echoed from beginning to end, formed the main legal basis for the China government to express its national sovereignty and territorial claims

Reference 1: Baidu Encyclopedia-Mandarin

Reference 2: Baidu Encyclopedia-Qing Dynasty.