Mårten Söderblom Saarela
Academia Sinica in Taipei

This blog post will discuss some transnational aspects of the history of Mandarin Chinese, what in the twentieth century became codified as the national language of China. I will first briefly discuss what China’s national language is, then look at a few aspects of its history that shows its entanglement with Inner Asian empires, non-Chinese languages, and scholars and students from elsewhere in East Asia and even Europe. Finally, I will discuss some of my own recent and ongoing research in this area, and end on what I think is an exciting avenue for future work.

Throughout my post, I will not make a strict separation of linguistic research on the history of the Mandarin language itself and historical research on the production and reception of the documents used to learn Mandarin in the past. I treat them as two aspects of the same story. The sources for the sounds of Mandarin are often the same documents that the historian uses to explore how it was studied.
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