The Sino-Japonic manuscript Xue-guanhua/Gaku-kanwa (Learning Mandarin Chinese), compiled for students from the Ry ky Kingdom, is a noteworthy historical Chinese educational source. It represents historical cross-cultural interactions between Okinawan residents in China and the locals in a wide variety of speech situations, and as such it is one of the few historical cross-cultural sources available on Chinese communication and social behaviour. Along with revealing norms of historical Chinese communication, Xue-guanhua provides a vivid description of Chinese social and cultural customs. The present volume, which provides a detailed introduction and annotated translation of Xue-guanhua, is relevant not only to researchers but also to readers with interest in Chinese and Okinawan language and culture.

《汉语官话方言音韵论集》收录了作者关于汉语官话方言与音韵方面的论文，主要集中在两个方面：入声的演变及层次，知系字的读音及演变。"入声的演变及层次"部分包括对北京话入声字、冀鲁官话中宕江摄入声字、山东方言古江摄入声字以及章丘方言入声调等的研究；"知系字的读音及演变"部分包括对北京话庄组字、官话方言宕江摄阳声韵知系字、官话方言古知庄章组声母等的研究。

While the language of Běijīng served together with Manchu as the court vernacular in the Qīng dynasty, the city's dialect was not widely accepted in China as the standard for Guānhuà even in the late nineteenth century. The preferred form was a mixed Mandarin koiné with roots going back much earlier, such as that represented in Lǐ Rǔzhēn's mid-Qīng rime compendium Lǐshì yīnjiàn. A similar form of mixed Mandarin served briefly as the National Pronunciation of China in the early twentieth century and came to be called lán-qīng Guānhuà 'blue-green Mandarin'. This heterogeneous norm incorporated features of a variety of Mandarin dialects and eventually came to be disparaged as an unrefined cousin of the pure Běijīng standard. Yet in origin the old National Pronunciation was designed to encompass a mix of regional forms and intended to contain the most broadly accepted elements of various Mandarin types. The evolution and development of the composite Guānhuà norm reveal much about Chinese linguistic attitudes of the early nineteenth through early twentieth centuries and shed light on various perspectives about what standard Chinese should be and what a Mandarin-based norm should represent. Broad popular acceptance of Běijīng as the governing norm for pronunciation began slowly to take hold only after the Ministry of Education of the Republic of China finally officially promoted Běijīng as the national standard in the 1930s. Yet it then had to compete with a new mixed vernacular orthography called Latinxua sinwenz. Běijīng was not firmly established as the norm until the People's Republic of China definitively declared the city's dialect as standard in the 1950s

This is a course in Standard Chinese, a language that is often colloquially referred to as Mandarin. The origins of this language and its position in the Chinese-speaking world will be discussed below, in the section on linguistic background

The Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics offers a systematic and comprehensive overview of the languages of China and the different ways in which they are and have been studied. It provides authoritative treatment of all important aspects of the languages spoken in China, today and in the past, from many different angles, as well as the different linguistic traditions in which they have been investigated.

Linguists have always seen the notion of "language" as inherently problematic, and the question of whether a particular form of speech should be classified as a separate language or a dialect of a language cannot be answered easily indeed. In this paper, criteria such as shared standard norm, common ethnic identity, and mutual intelligibility are shortly reviewed. Then another method of disentangling languages and dialects based on the number of shared cognates in the 100-word Swadesh list is proposed. The method is tested on various examples.