Devon Maloney. Saturday 30 April 2016 10.53 EDT Last modified on Monday 6 February 2017 09.24 EST. Margaret Atwoodâs feminist dystopian classic The Handmaidâs Tale is on its way to a series adaptation â Hulu in charge, Atwood consulting, and Elisabeth Moss starring as the titular handmaid Offred.
Mandarin is by far the largest of the seven or ten Chinese dialect groups, with 70 per cent of Chinese speakers and a huge area stretching from Yunnan in the southwest to Xinjiang in the northwest and Heilongjiang in the northeast.
Most Mandarin varieties have four tones. The final stops of Middle Chinese have disappeared in most of these varieties, but some have merged them as a final glottal stop. Many Mandarin varieties, including the Beijing dialect, retain retroflex initial consonants, which have been lost in southern dialect groups.