Is Cantonese the official language of the Song Dynasty? Is Wu the official language of Ming Dynasty?

In the Song Dynasty, the standard of Putonghua was Luoyang pronunciation, not Cantonese. In the Song Dynasty, Mandarin was called "sound" and "elegant tone", and Luoyang intonation was still the standard. In the Yuan Dynasty, Mongolian was officially designated as the national language (mainly used by Mongolians), and then Beiping pronunciation, that is, the Chinese pronunciation of the Yuan Dynasty capital (Beiping), was used as the standard pronunciation, which was called "the universal language".

The official language of the Ming Dynasty is Nanjing dialect, which is regarded as Wu dialect. In the Ming Dynasty, the elegance of the Central Plains was positive, but before the Ming Dynasty, the Central Plains was made up of many northern nationalities. Nanjing's "Voice of the Central Plains" is relatively pure, so Putonghua is based on Nanjing Mandarin and is the national standard Chinese pronunciation.

During the Yongle period, he moved the capital to Beijing and immigrated to Beijing from all over the world. Among them, there are about 400 thousand immigrants from Nanjing, accounting for half of Beijing's population. Nanjing dialect became the basis of Beijing pronunciation at that time, while Nanjing Mandarin was popular throughout the Ming Dynasty.

Extended data

Xin Yongfen, a professor at the School of International Sinology of Henan University, a national core expert of the "China Language Resources Protection Project" and the chief expert of Henan Province, analyzed the two languages from a professional perspective. Although it sounds to ordinary people that the "Mandarin" in the Song Dynasty is somewhat similar to Cantonese, there are still great differences.

Xin Yongfen explained that, first of all, the tone systems of the two dialects are different. There used to be eight tones in the Song Dynasty, but now there are nine tones in Cantonese. Moreover, the vowel pronunciation in the Song Dynasty was more complicated than it is now. Xin Yongfen said: "When Guang Yun was rebuilt in the Song Dynasty, there were 36 initials, and there were differences in voiced sounds. With the evolution of accent, Cantonese is now indistinguishable. The difference between the two is actually quite big. "

Baidu Encyclopedia-Mandarin

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