The origin of the term “Mandarin Chinese”
The English word Mandarin («Mandarin Chinese», «Northern Chinese») is not Chinese in origin. Its history is the result of a centuries-long chain of borrowings connecting ancient India, Southeast Asia, Portugal, and China.
To understand its origin, we must turn to China’s Ming and Qing dynasties. In the sixteenth century, during the Age of Discovery and flourishing maritime trade, Portuguese sailors, merchants, and missionaries arrived in China. They encountered a highly developed system of government based on Confucian bureaucracy and civil service examinations.
The Portuguese used mandarim to refer to Chinese officials. They borrowed it from Malay, which had the word menteri («minister», «adviser»). Malay, in turn, inherited it from Sanskrit mantrin or mantrī, meaning «adviser» or «minister of state» (readers may find themselves wondering about its connection with «mantra»). As the language of ancient Indian culture and religion, Sanskrit significantly influenced Southeast Asian languages from approximately the first millennium AD. The Portuguese adapted the term to their phonetics as mandarim, after which it entered English as mandarin.
Originally, mandarin referred not to a language but specifically to a Chinese official, a member of imperial China’s administration. Later, however, it also came to refer to the language, because of China’s linguistic situation.
Throughout its history, China has displayed exceptional linguistic diversity. Its vast territory contained hundreds of regional varieties of Chinese, many mutually unintelligible. Efficient government required officials to share an administrative language for paperwork and communication regardless of their origins. Gradually, this role was assumed by a supradialectal form of speech based mainly on northern Chinese dialects, especially those around the capital.
In Chinese tradition, this official language was called Guanhua (官话, Guānhuà), literally «speech of officials» or «language of officeholders». European Jesuit missionaries and merchants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries noticed that Chinese officials used this common form of speech rather than the dialects of their native regions. Since Europeans already called the officials «mandarins», they also began calling their language Mandarin, «the language of mandarins».
It should be emphasized that in China itself, the language was never officially called «Mandarin» in the European sense. Historically, the name was Guanhua (官话, Guānhuà). In the twentieth century, after the Qing dynasty fell in 1912 and modern nation-states formed, new official terms emerged. In mainland China, the standard language is called Putonghua (普通话, Pǔtōnghuà — «commonly understood speech»); in Taiwan, Guoyu (国语, Guóyǔ — «national language»); and in Singapore and some overseas Chinese communities, Huayu (华语, Huáyǔ — «Chinese language»).
The English word Mandarin is thus a kind of «linguistic monument» to sixteenth-century maritime trade. It preserves traces of Europeans’ first contacts with Ming China’s bureaucracy, as well as the complex chain of cultural and linguistic interactions linking India, the Malay world, Portugal, and China.