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Nanking Mandarin (南京官話) emerged in the South Zhili province of Ming dynasty of China around 1368, the year Nanjing made the capital. It was one of the historical standards of Mandarin.

Nomenclature and Linguistic origin
The native tongues of South Zhili province, where the capital Nanjing is located, consists, from north to south, Northern Mandarin, Southern Mandarin and Northern Wu. Through natural contact and mixing by speakers of different languages, a so-called koiné language emerged. Nanking Mandarin emerged as a result of the mixing of the Nanjing dialect (belongs to Lower Yangtze Mandarin, a major branch of Southern Mandarin) and the Luoyang dialect (belongs to Central Plains Mandarin, a major branch of Northern Mandarin). Broadly speaking it is a compromise of Southern Mandarin and Northern Mandarin. Earlier studies often attempt to prove it is either "largely a Nanjing dialect" or "largely Luoyang dialect", As both proves fall short, the idea that it is a koiné language become popular.

History of being the standard
Nanking Mandarin belongs to the Southern Mandarin variety, which distinguish from the Northern variety (in particular, the Beijing dialect) by retaining older features, most notably the retaining of checked tone and the absence of Manchu loanwords. Nanjing, along with the Hangzhou dialect in the earlier Southern Song dynasty, are the two occasions when the Southern variety of Mandarin made its mark in the historical standards of Mandarin. The standard later shifted from Nanjing to Beijing as Qing dynasty made it the new capital. The Nanjing dialect in Ming dynasty and the Beijing dialect in Qing dynasty is collectively known as Imperial Mandarin.

Prestige status domestically and abroad
Nanking Mandarin is well-known to foreigners at the time as the lingua franca among Imperial Chinese bureaucrats. Jesuit missionaries to China, most notably Matteo Ricci, is fluent in Nanking Mandarin. Standard Beijing Mandarin overtook Nanking Mandarin to be the prestige dialect among Imperial bureaucrats sometime between 1815 and 1867.

In 1815, Robert Morrison dismissed the Beijing dialect as "Tartar-Chinese dialect" and rejected it to be the phonological base of his newly written Dictionary of the Chinese Language (1815), yet he also remarked the Tartar-Chinese dialect is "now gradually gaining ground, and if the Dynasty continues long, will finally prevail".

The change is reflected in 1867 when diplomat Thomas Francis Wade quoted missionary Joseph Edkins's observation that "the Nanking Mandarin is more widely understood than that of Peking... [But] the Peking dialect must be studied by those who would speak the language of the imperial court, and what is, when purified of its localisms, the accredited kuanhua of the empire."

In the southwest frontier
Ming dynasty sent army expeditions to the southwest frontier of the Empire. These garrisons lived in fortress villages ("tunbao") and retained their languages, which are different to locals who arrived in the earlier Tang dynasty and Yuan dynasty. It is therefore major research interests to explore the similarities between Nanking Mandarin and the descendants of these fortress villages, most notably Yunnan Mandarin in Yunnan and Tunbao dialects in Guizhou, both belonging to Southwestern Mandarin, a major subdivision of Southern Mandarin.

In Lower Yangtze
As pointed out in #Nomenclature paragraph, Nanjing Mandarin barely survived to modern times in the province where Nanjing is located.city it named after. The first blow to the local Nanjing dialect came with the Taiping Rebellion in the 1850s that led to massive population losses in Jiangnan region, including Nanjing. From then, the Nanjing dialect gradually lose its features. In 1913, the new Republic of China shifted the standard dialect back to Nanjing and rename it as

Old National Pronunciation, yet, the dwindling number of speakers of Nanking Mandarin outside Nanjing as a result of p

The major blow came from around 1990, when teachers across mainland China, including Nanjing, are penalized for using local varieties of Chinese as the medium of instruction. On school posters and government propaganda, students are told that any variety of Chinese other than Standard Beijing Mandarin are "uncivilized dialects". As a consequence, the mainland Chinese generation born after mid-1990s generally develops hostility towards learning or speaking their ancestor's or parents' mother tongue, of which, includes the Nanjing dialect.

Scope of speakers
Before the advance of modern media to promote a language, "a standard could only inﬂuence a limited geographical area where a large population of speakers of the standard pronunciation was accessible". The dialects of metropolises Beijing, Luoyang, and Nanjing served as the local standards in their respective areas. As Jerry Norman stated, “Neither of these forms of bureaucratic Chinese was codiﬁed in any fashion; they simply developed as a natural response to the need for a practical medium to carry on the day-to-day business of the empire”.