In English, the term Mandarin is used in two senses: as the name of the family of dialects known as guānhuà 官話 in Chinese, and as the name of standard Chinese, also called Pǔtōnghuà 普通話 ‘common language’ or Guóyǔ 國語 ‘national language’. In this sketch, we focus on the phonology of standard Chinese. Among Chinese dialect families, the Mandarin family is the biggest in terms of both geographic spread and native speaker population…