Linguistic Information
Northeastern Mandarin is extremely close to the Beijing dialect of Standard Chinese. The Chinese dialectologist Li Rong (李荣) believes that Beijing Mandarin could be classified as a northeastern dialect, because Beijing shares more tonal and phonological features - for example, the preservation of initial over - with northeastern Mandarin than with the language of Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing. However, in northeastern Chinese, final -ian or -üan is pronounced with an rather than with or as in the standard.
One hypothesis for the similarities tells that as the Ming-Qing Transition overturned the government in Beijing in 1644, hundreds of thousands of Manchu people - the northeastern ethnic group of the new ruling family - moved into the Chinese capital. The Manchus adopted Mandarin Chinese as an official language along with their naitve Manchu before they invaded China proper and took Beijing, due to the massive amount of Chinese officials and soldiers decting to their side. They would become over 30% of the city's population and eventually their version of Mandarin Chinese wielded influence over the local Chinese dialect.
Read more about this topic: Northeastern Mandarin
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