Originally Posted by
moondog
As you probably know, one of the many Chinese words for Mandarin is 普通话, which = common language. I think this term was coined during the 1950s around the same time simplified Chinese characters were introduced in Mainland China. Both of these measures were designed to facilitate communication between people from different regions, and also improve the literacy rate (i.e. simple characters might not be pretty, but they are easy to learn)..
I'm illiterate but presumably it is phonetically "putonghua". Mandarin is/was also known as the equivalent of "national language" (in the RoC) and "Chinese language" (IIRC in SE Asia). I don't now what it is called in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines.
As far as facilitating communication goes, the same occured in Québec a few centuries ago with people coming from all over what is now France (but mostly from the west). They apparently decided to standardise on a dialect understood in Ile de France area.
New countries like the U.S. and Canada (latter where English was prevalent) didn't really have languages developng in relative isolation. I would say accents did develop locally, probably fuelled by ethnic pockets.
Resurgent languages also present challenges. I had breakfast at a chambre d'hote with a Japanese man a few years ago. He apparently decided to settle in Barcelona to study Spanish. Little did he realise he got caught up in a resurgence of Catalan so his Spanish (or as the Latin Americans would call it, Castellan) was still very rudimentary as he unknowingly learned Catalan.