Mandarin Chinese is the primary formal Chinese language taught academically to students in Chinese Filipino private schools (historically established by and meant for Chinese Filipinos) and additionally across other private and public schools, universities, and institutions in the Philippines, especially as the formal written Chinese language.
Both Standard Chinese (PRC) and Taiwanese Mandarin (ROC) are taught and spoken in the Philippines depending on the school, with some schools using simplified Chinese characters, some using traditional Chinese characters, and some using a mixture of both. Meanwhile, Chinese-language publications have traditionally used traditional Chinese characters. In modern times, it is usually predominantly written horizontally left-to-right (or traditionally right-to-left), but some schools, such as Chiang Kai Shek College, etc., and newspapers, such as United Daily News, sometimes traditionally write it vertically as well. Mandarin in the Philippines is typically known in Mandarin and typically in Philippine Hokkien .
Mandarin Chinese is formally used in print publications in Chinese-language newspapers and books in the Philippines, such as World News, United Daily News, Chinese Commercial News, and many others.
Classification Mandarin in the Philippines can be classified into two distinct Mandarin dialects: Standard Mandarin and Colloquial Mandarin. Standard Mandarin is either the standard language of mainland China or Taiwan, while Colloquial Mandarin in the Philippines tends to combine features from Mandarin () and features from Hokkien () of the local Philippine Hokkien dialect, which is the heritage language of many Chinese Filipinos.
Usage
Only a small minority of Chinese Filipinos claim Mandarin as their native first language, with Filipino (Tagalog) or English or Philippine Hokkien typically being the first language. The lack of environment for speaking the language and the difficulty of learning it created not just a lack of interest, but even great disgust by some towards it.
Efforts in the 21st century to promote Mandarin Chinese education in Chinese Filipino institutions and recent utilitarian trends, such as more Mandarin job opportunities, recent immigrants from China or Taiwan, summer education trips to China or Taiwan, encouragement of universities and schools by past presidents, and education exchange deals with China have spurred interest and potential for growth in the usage of Mandarin.
Code-switching Sometimes Chinese Filipinos also code-switch Mandarin together with other languages, such as English, Tagalog (or other Philippine languages), and Hokkien, as a form of pidgin language, just like Hokaglish or Singlish.
Education
There are about 150 or so Chinese schools that exist throughout the Philippines, around a third of which operate in Metro Manila. Most education of Standard Chinese (Mandarin) provided in the Philippines is facilitated through Chinese Filipino schools established by Chinese Filipinos, which typically include the teaching of Standard Chinese (Mandarin) in one or multiple Chinese class subjects depending on the school, along with other school class subjects taught in English or Filipino (Tagalog) depending on the class subject.
History The earliest evident record of Mandarin Chinese in the Philippines, excluding the earliest Classical Chinese texts printed in the Philippines by the Spanish friars, are from manuscripts made by the Spanish friars studying Chinese during the 1600s-1700s, such as the Dictionario Hispanico Sinicum (1626-1642), which primarily studied Hokkien Chinese in the Philippines but also additionally started to add romanized Mandarin Chinese sourced from their Sangley Chinese informants, whether in early Spanish Philippines or from late Ming China, which back then centuries ago, the Spaniards had not fully understood yet the differences between the Chinese language family.
Historically, the first and oldest Chinese school in the Philippines, the Anglo-Chinese School「小呂宋華僑中西學堂」(modern-day Tiong Se Academy), was founded on April 15, 1899 by Engracio Palanca Tan Kang, the son of Carlos Palanca Tan Quien Sien, the Gobernadorcillo de los Sangleyes or Capitan chino of Binondo (Manila Chinatown) and the first acting consul general of Qing China to the Philippines, just after the end of the Spanish colonial era and the early months of the Philippine-American War during the start of the American colonial era. It first held classes at the backyard of the Imperial Chinese Consulate-General, with only about twenty students when it first opened. Its initial curriculum was the study of the Chinese classics, letter writing (尺牘) in Chinese characters, and how to use the Chinese abacus (珠算) with the language of instruction initially mainly monolingually in Hokkien, sometimes with some English, mainly studying the reading and writing of Classical Chinese (漢文, Hokkien ) and Chinese mathematics (算術, ; 數學, ) with books and teachers mainly imported from Southern Fujian, closely serving the needs of the local Hokkien-speaking Chinese community of the Philippines. It served to increase literacy in a time of widespread illiteracy for practical purposes such as to be able to read Chinese characters via reading the Chinese classics for higher learning, write in Chinese characters to be able to write letters to mail to family, friends, or business purposes, and do mathematics with the abacus for business purposes, such as accounting and finance.
The gradual shift to the modern curriculum of teaching Mandarin in the Philippines came mainly around the founding of the Republic of China (ROC) around 1912 after the 1911 Xinhai Revolution ended the Qing dynasty in China. During the early 20th century in 1902, Imperial Japan had initiated a standardized form of the Japanese language, known in , which inspired reformers of the Qing bureaucracy in China, enough that in 1909, the Qing education ministry officially proclaimed the Nanking-based late imperial Mandarin too in Mandarin , which its status continued even after the fall of the Qing dynasty, only decades later gradually switching to the modern Beijing-based Mandarin. During the early 20th century American colonial era in the Philippines, newly founded Chinese schools gradually adopted the modern curriculum from China, which included Chinese language, history, geography, math, and sciences, which the language of instruction shifted from monolingual Hokkien to bilingual Hokkien and Mandarin instruction, where initially the Hokkien-speaking Filipino-Chinese teacher would primarily read and explain Chinese texts in Hokkien, whilst simultaneously teaching how it is read in Mandarin for the average Hokkien-speaking Filipino-Chinese student back then, since Mandarin was the official "national language" of ROC, often translated as "Chinese language" from an outside-China perspective. Mandarin Chinese was known back then during the founding of ROC to even now in Philippine Hokkien , while in Mandarin , since formally there is a risk of confusion to which country a word that means 'national language' is in reference to. Chinese textbooks as used in Chinese schools in the Philippines during the early 20th century usually did not include any romanization, besides Chinese characters, but it was also the period when Zhuyin Fuhao / Bopomofo was first introduced and taught in Chinese schools in the Philippines, usually known in Philippine Hokkien , after the system's first name in Mandarin . During the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, it also spurred more refugees and migrants from China to migrate to American-era Philippines, enough that many were educated folk from China that became the Chinese teachers in the new Chinese schools being founded.
During the early 20th century, some Chinese schools in the Philippines also initially added an English class to keep pace with the increasing formal usage of English, which Philippine society gradually adopted under and after the American colonial era. This led to the Chinese schools later adopting a dual curriculum, where there were two independent divisions known as the English Division and the Chinese Division, where each division was held in the morning or afternoon. The Chinese division was patterned after the curriculum standards of primary and secondary education established by the ROC government, while the English division followed the curriculum standards of the primary and secondary education required by the Department of Public Instruction (modern-day Department of Education (DepEd)) of American-era Philippines. The system had issues with duplicated subjects such as mathematics and science which were taught once in English and also another time in the Chinese curriculum. This dual curriculum system though made it so the education then produced trilingual then later quadrilingual students, as the Chinese division used both Hokkien and Mandarin, while the English division initially used English. By the Commonwealth era of the Philippines, Tagalog was proclaimed by Pres. Manuel Quezon on December 31, 1937 as the basis of the National Language () of the Philippines. This made it so, the English division additionally added a Tagalog class as well, which during Japanese occupation in WW2, the teaching of Tagalog, Philippine history, and personal character education was given priority instead of English. The Chinese division typically included class subjects like math, science, history, geography, civics, ethics, etc., wherein Mandarin was mainly used in Chinese language class and Chinese literature class, where Chinese teachers mainly read Chinese texts and words in Mandarin and explained them in Hokkien. Class subjects though such as mathematics and sciences in the Chinese division were mainly taught in Hokkien. During this time, Chinese language, literature, and mathematics, were mainly taught via rote memorization, known in Philippine Hokkien , where teachers pointed to a picture of an object or animal, then recited the Mandarin vocabulary words together side-by-side their equivalent Hokkien words in Chinese language class, which students were expected to repeatedly recite and orally memorize (e.g. teacher points to a fly, students recite: , ; teacher points to a mosquito, students recite: ; ), then for Chinese mathematics class, the multiplication tables were mainly memorized in Hokkien (e.g. "2 × 1 = 2, 2 × 2 = 4, 2 × 3 = 6" are read in Philippine Hokkien ).