Learning to Speak "Mandarin" in China: 1913-1935

My talk draws from a book manuscript in progress, titled The Sounds of Mandarin: The Making of a National Language in China and Taiwan, 1913-1965, taking speech as the starting point for investigation, asking how "Mandarin" became the lingua franca of two nations separated by one hundred miles across the Taiwan Straits and challenging the assumption that China's national language was born whole at the time of its creation. The goal is to disaggregate "Mandarin" into historically specific moments of linguistic experimentation, and to rethink how the idea and the multiple realities of the national language intersected with the lives of ordinary people. In this presentation, I am particularly interested in the surviving remnants of early twentieth-century sound technology that provide opportunities to hear the changing sounds of a language in the process of formation.