The Putonghua reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Jul-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Putonghua

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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