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Pǔtōnghuà (Simplified Chinese:
普通话 Traditional Chinese:
普通話) was adopted by the People's Republic of China as the official pronunciation of Chinese language words. It literally means "ordinary speech."
Both Putonghua and Guoyu are essentially standardized official
varieties of Mandarin. The theory behind putonghua,
however, is very different from that of guoyu (國語, lit. "national
language"). Guoyu is based exclusively on the pronunciation of words from Beijing and
putonghua is influenced by non-Beijing pronunciations.
Putonghua and guoyu refer to speech and hence the difference in the use of simplified characters and traditional characters is
not usually considered to be a difference between these two concepts.
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