Some form of Mandarin has served as a lingua franca for government officials and the courts since the 14th century. The Chinese capital has been within the Mandarin-speaking area for most of the last millennium, making these dialects very influential. Many Mandarin varieties, including the Beijing dialect, retain retroflex initial consonants, which have been lost in southern varieties of Chinese.
The final stops of Middle Chinese have disappeared in most of these varieties, but some have merged them as a final glottal stop. The second most spoken is Yue ("Cantonese" because it includes the Cantonese variety). This is generally attributed to the greater ease of travel and communication in the North China Plain compared to the more mountainous south, combined with the relatively recent spread of Mandarin to frontier areas. Mandarin is by far the largest of the seven or ten Chinese dialect groups it is spoken by 70 percent of all Chinese speakers over a large geographical area that stretches from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast. Nevertheless, Mandarin as a group is often placed first in lists of languages by number of native speakers (with nearly one billion). Many varieties of Mandarin, such as those of the Southwest (including Sichuanese) and the Lower Yangtze, are not mutually intelligible with the standard language (or are only partially intelligible). Because Mandarin originated in North China and most Mandarin dialects are found in the north, the group is sometimes referred to as Northern Chinese ( simplified Chinese: 北方话 traditional Chinese: 北方話 pinyin: Běifānghuà lit. The group includes the Beijing dialect, the basis of the phonology of Standard Chinese, the official language of China. 'officials' speech') is a group of Sinitic ("Chinese") languages and dialects that are natively spoken across most of northern and southwestern China. Mandarin ( / ˈ m æ n d ər ɪ n/ ( listen) simplified Chinese: 官话 traditional Chinese: 官話 pinyin: Guānhuà lit. A speaker from Tanghe ( Central Plains Mandarin)