In English
Among linguists, it is known as Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin. Colloquially, it is imprecisely referred simply as Mandarin, though "Mandarin" may refer to

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The Chinese have different languages in different provinces, to such an extent that they cannot understand each other.... [They] also have another

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From an official point of view, Standard Chinese serves the purpose of a lingua franca—a way for speakers of the several mutually unintelligible

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The usual unit of analysis is the syllable, consisting of an optional initial consonant, an optional medial glide, a main vowel and an optional coda, and further distinguished by a tone.
The palatal initials [tɕ], [tɕʰ] and [ɕ] pose a classic problem of

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Many honorifics that were in use in imperial China have not been used in daily conversation in modern-day Mandarin, such as jiàn (賤; 贱; "my humble") and guì (貴; 贵; "your honorable").
Although Chinese speakers make a clear distinction between

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Standard Chinese is written with characters corresponding to syllables of the language, most of which represent a morpheme. In most cases, these characters come from

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Chinese is a strongly analytic language, having almost no inflectional morphemes, and relying on word order and particlesto express relationships

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