Cantonese is only one vote away from becoming a national language. Is that really the case?

Professor Peking University once compiled a book "Why are there so many dialects in the South". This article is from "Local accent is hard to change", which has been mentioned many times. During the Republic of China, Guangdong was a big economic province with many high-level people. At that time, many members of Guangdong were Cantonese, so there were rumors that many Guangdong members said that Cantonese would be the standard national language. As soon as this statement came out, it caused an uproar in many media, so XX language was born and became the national language. But rumors are still just rumors after all, and people simply can't find the evidence they deserve.

In fact, this matter can be traced back to before the Revolution of 1911. At that time, the academic department of the Qing government had a memory of unifying Mandarin. The content of this memory is to choose an official unified prophecy, and the word Mandarin will also replace the previous Mandarin. At that time, China's political power was in the hands of the Qing Dynasty, so the unified official language of the Qing Dynasty was Manchu. This meeting summarized this rule. The meeting finally decided to use Beijing dialect as an accent to express Putonghua. From the beginning, the meeting decided that there was no Cantonese or other dialects at all. Unfortunately, as soon as this decree came out, the Qing Dynasty collapsed. This arduous task can only be handed over to future generations. When the Republic of China was first established, Cai Yuanpei was then Minister of Education, so he was naturally responsible for unifying the national language.

From 65438 to 0927, Cai Yuanpei organized a temporary education conference. The content of this meeting is to discuss various educational issues. In that year1February, the Ministry of Education formulated the "Unified Method of Putonghua", which is to formally determine the pronunciation of words. This is also the first time in China's history that the official Mandarin pronunciation has been decided by open and democratic voting. After all, the people attending the meeting are eagerly awaited by all sectors of education, and there will inevitably be disputes during the meeting, but there is nothing in Cantonese in the debate here. At that time, Wu Zhihui, the spokesman of the conference, wanted to keep the voiced initials in the ancient sound. He said that these letters are gorgeous to read, and others can feel the vitality of China people from the sound.

However, the MPs behind were caught in a fight about tenors from east to west, north and south. In the end, they can only take the most laborious method, let every province vote for pronunciation, and finally get the best votes. In fact, all regions have a fascination with the ancient sound, so those regions that firmly believe that they were elected as the national sound by only one vote think that the ancient official sound of the Central Plains is perfectly preserved in the local area. This idea is still very tasty to chew. After all, the ancient sound itself is a very elusive concept. At that time, Hakkas were distributed all over the country, but generally speaking, most of them were concentrated in eastern Guangdong and western Fujian. According to the geographical conditions at that time, this location was actually some extremely barren places, even among the local Han people in the Central Plains at that time.

As the saying goes, the pronunciation of Shili is controversial, but people all over the world always want to study and do business, so since ancient times, there have been homophones in various places, such as Qilu dialect, also known as Qilu pronunciation. But in fact, changes in a regional New Deal center will also affect local broadcasting. For example, in the Ming Dynasty, Shanghai was only a small town and Jiaxing was the administrative center of Shanghai, so Jiaxing dialect became the most popular dialect in Shanghai. But in the Qing Dynasty, the administrative center of Shanghai became Suzhou, and Suzhou dialect became the most orthodox dialect.

At the same time, language also spreads with culture. At that time, Liyuan toured all over the country, imitating Suzhou accent everywhere. Even Beijingers with southern accents will receive special respect, and even prostitutes will pretend to have Suzhou accents in order to improve their status. Therefore, it is common to say that many dialects are different, and it is not surprising that even the dialects of a place have changed in a certain period of time.